Paper short abstract:

In the context of the migrant 'crisis' in France, we compare need and response in large-scale refugee reception centers on the one hand and small-scale community level programs on the other. We discuss humanitarian actions in these contexts, exploring how they are impacted by questions of scale.

Paper long abstract:

We are positioned through our work as social scientists and as activist/humanitarian volunteers working in different contexts in France, to explore and comment on the question of scale posed in this panel. One of us (Evangeline) has conducted dissertation field research on European reception centers for migrants and refugees, sites of national and international humanitarian intervention, where global tensions of identity, belonging and human rights are made manifest. In contrast, Shukti works with associations connected to municipalities and local communes in the Paris region, where volunteers welcome and socially 'integrate' refugee and migrant Others by helping them acquire necessary linguistic and cultural communication skills. Whether at this level of grassroots community initiatives or at the larger level of national and international organizations working in border regions between states, individual actors demonstrate solidarity and humanity in their interactions with the Other. We are interested in better understanding the common experiences that bind these different social actors/agents and motivate their humanitarian impulses, while also understanding the specific challenges and issues particular to these different contexts of aid that affect their benevolent actions. In this paper we engage with differences of scale in terms of: modes of helping in these different contexts, especially with respect to the ratio of need versus responders; communicative practices embedded in these different frameworks; and cultural ideologies of belonging and nation that motivate different forms of humanitarian action and intervention.