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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.