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- Convenors:
-
Jan Grill
Carna Brkovic (University of Mainz)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on 'moral labor' (Fechter) performed by aid workers. Approaching morality as a form of labor that brings about particular moral selves, as well as particular moral economies, we invite papers that explore moral labor in various contemporary and historical humanitarian settings.
Long Abstract:
This panel focuses on 'moral labor' (Fechter 2016) performed by aid workers: a specific kind of immaterial labor that is needed to resolve the contradictions of their position of wanting to help people in need, but never quite being able to achieve their goals. Approaching morality as a form of labor that brings about particular moral selves, as well as particular moral economies, we invite papers that explore moral labor in various contemporary and historical humanitarian settings. We seek to examine different labor practices, experiences and modes of being socially and morally invested in the context of encountering precarious situations and navigating uncertain temporal horizons in humanitarian, development, and aid settings.
What kind of moral selves emerge through a negotiation of contradictions of aid work? How does moral labor help to negotiate legitimacy of aid work in the moral economy of the international aid industry? How are moral economies of aid work organized in the case of local humanitarian organizations, or grassroots humanitarians? Or when the aid workers or volunteers are based in the 'Global South', or the 'Global East'? What propels different aid workers to endure and to persist in their humanitarian efforts and struggles? What bodily experiences and effects does this relational moral labor produce in different spatial and temporal contexts? How does moral labor relate to affective labor in humanitarian settings? How do these different forms of immaterial labor reconfigure relations between commitment to help others and care for the self?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Jiazhi Fengjiang (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how "persistence" and "creativity" become the key idioms for ordinary people in China to enact their "moral labor" in pursuit of their humanitarian projects
Paper long abstract:
The past two decades witness the tremendous growth of grassroots philanthropic and humanitarian projects in China. This paper explores how ordinary people are experimenting with creative ways to "persist" in their efforts and struggles to bring gongyi (literally means common good) into being. Unlike better-off and wealthy philanthropists and volunteers, whose philanthropic activities tend to enhance their status and dominance, the ordinary people presented in this paper experience major tension between providing for their family and caring for others in society, between ensuring the material conditions of the good life and being able to live ethical lives as contributing members of society and being socially recognised for doing so. Hence, pursuing such gongyi objectives can require extremely hard work and be emotionally draining for many ordinary people. Philanthropic and humanitarian engagement does not lead to substantial and sustainable material returns, yet the creative imaginations and public actions of ordinary people open up possibilities for valorising life in social arenas despite and within the prevailing economic valorisation of life.
Malay Firoz (Arizona State University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces humanitarian morality through liminal utterances of auto-critique among aid workers around resilience-based approaches to aid in Jordan and Lebanon, revealing a heterogenous field of discourse sutured by different imaginaries of what constitutes a properly moral act.
Paper long abstract:
Humanitarian studies is marked by a structuring tension between two seemingly incongruent approaches to the epistemic status of morality in humanitarian reason. While macro-structural analyses treat the normative commitments of the “humanitarian-industrial complex” as a yardstick by which to diagnose the sector’s aggregate failures, ethnographic engagements with the phenomenological worlds of aid workers take humanitarian labour on its own terms as a moral striving to save life in duress. In this paper, I trace a different register of humanitarian ethics by addressing what Didier Fassin calls the “liminal” practice of auto-critique among aid workers themselves, i.e. formulations of ethical value articulated in the interstices of authorized discourse, which resist the carefully sanitized performances of moral consensus conveyed by official policy reports. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jordan and Lebanon, I explore how aid workers grapple with their expanding responsibilities under the UN’s “resilience-based” approach to the Syrian refugee crisis, which calls on them to build resilience among both refugees and vulnerable citizens in asylum countries. Rather than simply “exposing” the limits of flawed policy, I attend to the minutiae of internal debates, fractures and contestations among aid workers around the resilience agenda, revealing a heterogenous field of discourse sutured by multiple imaginaries and rationalities of what constitutes a properly moral act. My paper thus offers a granular view of humanitarian morality as a radically contingent and open-ended labour, whose ends are perpetually subject to situational recalibration in the unstable arena of contemporary crises.
Jethro Norman (DIIS)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on multi-sited research in Somaliland’s borderland regions and expanding Fassin’s (2011) concept of ‘humanitarian government’, this paper reveals how the norms, values and emotions associated with multiple forms of aid are produced, resisted, circulated, and appropriated ‘on the ground’.
Paper long abstract:
It is well-known that the provision of humanitarian aid produces hierarchies between expatriate aid workers, exploited local employees, and disposable local life (Fassin, 2011). Yet does aid from the diaspora present a radical alternative to the international aid system, or can it also entrench existing inequalities and create new hierarchies? International and diasporic aid tend to be studied separately or characterised as parallel, even competing processes. Drawing on multi-sited research in Somaliland’s borderland regions I show that international and diasporic humanitarian interventions not only share the same ‘humanitarian space ‘(Hilhorst and Jansen, 2010) but are entangled in complex and counterintuitive ways. I develop a moral economy approach that expands Didier Fassin’s concept of ‘humanitarian government’(Fassin, 2011) to reveal how the norms, values and emotions associated with multiple forms of aid are produced, resisted, circulated, and appropriated ‘on the ground’. On the one hand, I find that diasporic aid positions itself as an ‘anti-humanitarian machine’ (c.f. Ferguson), critiquing and exposing the underlying political and moral imperatives of international aid. Yet despite fundamentally contrasting logics of humanitarian assistance, in certain circumstances there is also significant coordination and overlap, including the recent emergence of entities that fuse the logic of diasporic aid with the legal-bureaucratic structures of international aid. Both diasporic and international aid are therefore distinct yet related forms of humanitarian governance that emerge out of the same context of structural global inequality and share the same basic tension between compassion and repression.
Khorshid Khodabakhshreshad (Georg August Universität Göttingen)
Paper short abstract:
Which moralization takes place after summer 2015 in the field of refugees support work in Germany? Moralization appeared to be one of the main motives concerning acts of activists and volunteers in the field. Moralities of both show up in different levels which I will elaborate in this panel.
Paper long abstract:
During my fieldwork, interviews, participatory observations, conversations, and conflicts in my PhD project, titled New boom of refugee support. Between Welcome Culture and Refugees Welcome. An ethnographic and genealogical investigation., I have understood that moralization is one of the main motives concerning the acts of actors within the field of refugee support work. Moralities of both, activists and volunteers, show up in different levels.
Volunteers on the one hand regard refugees to be good if they are integrated in contrast to those who are not, and themselves to be helpful and therefore good in contrast to Nazis and PeGiDa. Doing this they open othering processes which can be understood as colonial practices. Activists on the other hand distance themselves from these honorary helpers and thus moralize them in interviews and conversations as colonial perpetrators. In this point of view the activists do the meaningful things and are therefore good.
In addition, I also see my own moral level in the field. What do I do as a researcher, activist and volunteer of color? I keep asking myself, how can I discuss and write about morality in cultural anthropology? Writing about moral values of the white German volunteers puts me in a balancing act between an impossible objectivity which denies my own morality, an un-/conscious judging and the requirement to do sound cultural anthropological research.