Paper Short Abstract:

This paper looks at how citizenship is negotiated through volunteering at a community centre in East London and explores how newcomers in precarious migration situations (with precarious access to citizen's rights) engage with volunteering that is promoted as 'civic participation' by the state.

Paper Abstract:

Volunteering emerges as a domain where notions of citizenship are negotiated and contested. Western nation-states promote volunteering as ‘civic participation’; however; people in precarious migration situations (either undocumented or in the asylum process) are encouraged to volunteer in Civil Society Organisations, despite their limited access to citizen’s rights. What happens when people engage in activities of ‘civic participation’ whose claim to citizenship is massively curtailed or right out rejected by the nation-state? This paper explores the paradoxical engagement of undocumented or asylum-seeking newcomers with volunteering activities in a community centre in East London. Based on ongoing fieldwork, the paper will analyse novel forms of negotiated citizenship that emerge through volunteering and explore how newcomers in precarious migration situations engage with volunteering roles as part of their bricolage of survival strategies. Volunteering emerges as a space of experimentation where roles of provisioning and citizenship are tried out and where power dynamics can be momentarily subverted. The paper takes a critical look at the implicit and explicit ideas of ‘empowerment’ that are being projected onto volunteering activities by Civil Society Organisations, and focuses on how newcomers are engaged in acts of ‘infrastructuring’ through volunteering.