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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, -Paper short abstract:
This paper zooms in on the moral labor by young men with a forced migration background who employ the subject position of ‘refugee role model.’ It shows how this subject position 'sticks' in ways that weigh on them, but also grounds their commitment to help recent migrants in precarious situations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on young men who recently fled from Syria, are allocated housing in Rotterdam (the Netherlands), and now want to help other people in need by starting a refugee support organization. These aspiring aid workers are commonly referred to as ‘refugee role model’ and deliberately perform as ‘good citizen’ and ‘good working subject.’ Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this paper zooms in on these service-providers with a forced migration background who invoke the subject position of ‘refugee role model.’ As form of self-identification and as a vehicle to signal oneself to others, this subject position is grounded in racial, gendered, and sexualized imaginations that the young men actively employ, but that haunt them at the same time. This paper brings forward the mimetic ways in which the young organizers publicly reinvent themselves in alignment with this moral self, and elucidates what propels their commitment to help others. It shows how, in a moral economy that keeps in motion the imperative to reciprocate, being a ‘refugee role model’ serves to convey the message that the young men are no longer recipient of aid, but that they have transitioned into service-provider instead. My analysis sheds light on the labor these organizers invest in persisting with their envisioned support organization and in dealing with the ways in which the subject position of role model weighs on them. It argues that, in moving from beneficiary to service-provider, the young organizers yearn to be recognized as good (self-)entrepreneurs and to secure a livelihood.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the field of asylum in Italy, this paper explores aid workers’ attempts at re-instantiating their everyday work as a proper form of - moral - labour, as well as the underexplored continuity between humanitarian work and forms of political activism.
Paper long abstract:
A well-established body of anthropological research has underscored the depoliticizing effects of humanitarianism, by shedding light on how aid practices often end up - albeit mostly involuntarily - reproducing structures of power and control. In this paper, I engage with a reflection on the political subjectivities and possibilities that can emerge from within the workings of humanitarian systems. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement in the field of asylum in Italy, I explore practices, perceptions and “unruly feelings” (Fortier 2016) of aid workers engaged in everyday humanitarian assistance to refugees. In Italy in recent years, the sharp decline of refugee boat landings, coupled with growing hostility towards migration, prompted drastic budget cuts in refugee reception. This scenario exacerbated the multiple inadequacies of the asylum system. At the same time, it further deteriorated the already precarious working conditions of asylum workers, most of them overqualified young people hit by the consequences of economic recession. In the name of the moral imperative to offer care and support, they were often supposed to come to terms with their anger and frustration. Yet, some of them started engaging in – more or less explicit – forms of protest, organized around the recurring statement “we are not volunteers”. Those struggles hint at aid workers’ efforts to re-instantiate their everyday tasks as a proper form of (moral) labor. At the same time, they evoke the underexplored continuity between humanitarian work and forms of political activism.
Paper short abstract:
This paper critically interrogates the claim that ‘homelessness ended’ in the UK during the COVID crisis. I suggest that the realisation of this goal was uneven; and that it was only achieved by the momentary resolution of longstanding crises of governance by moral labour on the frontline.
Paper long abstract:
In March 2020, the British Government announced ‘Everyone In’: an audacious policy initiative that was intended to ‘end homelessness’ when the UK was on the brink of the first national lockdown. Based on an ethnographic study of one English metropolitan borough, this paper recounts the emergency labour of those homeless charity workers who were at the coalface of making Everyone In a reality. It considers the paradoxes and difficulties that Everyone In presented those officials on the frontline. It suggests that Everyone In represented a deferral of the longstanding systemic causes of homelessness, namely the conjoined decline in social housing and financialisation of housing more generally. In this context, I argue that governmental announcements to ‘end homelessness’ were impossible to realise in its entirety and that it only compounded disorder for all parties involved in the early stages of its implementation: an ‘unfix’. I detail how the initial announcement of Everyone In amplified and generated both old and new challenges of the enterprise of ending homelessness. These include the fractured tiers of governance, the insecure and opaque nature of state funding and the consequences of speculative policy making. If a momentary end of homelessness did take place, it was above all an achievement of those workers on the frontline who resolved these absurdities through their own pursuits of the public good. A reprise, it was the culmination of their labour from the bottom-up: to fix the unfixes that Everyone In had initially heralded from top-to-bottom.
Paper short abstract:
I will examine how religious beliefs inform and shape social outreach imaginaries among Latin American Pentecostal churches in Barcelona. I seek to contribute to anthropological conversations regarding the role of immigration and religion in the humanitarian field in neoliberal settings.
Paper long abstract:
In times when States' role in providing welfare is constantly negotiated in political discourses and policies implementation, individuals and communities are often called upon to utilise their scarce resources -time, money, labour, emotional care- to help vulnerable populations in need. Some who respond to these calls are driven by faith.
The recent growth of Evangelical churches has reshaped the humanitarian field in Catalonia. There are 164 Protestant NGOs in Spain, and their combined overall budget places them as the fifth largest network of NGOs in the country (Tarquis, 2017). According to data from the Official representatives of evangelical Churches around 50% of evangelical churches based in Spain regularly carry out social outreach activities (Diaconía, 2015). Immigrants not only make up the congregation of many of these Evangelical churches in Spain (Montañés, 2015; Perez-Agote and Santiago, 2009), but also engage actively in outreach activities. How do ethnic and national identities impact the outreach activities of evangelical churches? Are humanitarian activities carried out by Christian immigrants a form of claiming local belonging and citizenship?
In this communication, I will examine how religious beliefs inform and shape social outreach imaginaries and practices among Latin American Pentecostal churches in Barcelona. I seek to contribute to anthropological conversations regarding the role of immigration and religion in the humanitarian field in neoliberal settings.