Paper Short Abstract:

The everyday life of volunteers from European grassroots pro-refugee solidarity initiatives is fuelled by moments of moral crises and hesitations, which contribute to shaping and redefining solidarity and challenging European universalist ideals of "the good".

Paper Abstract:

Grassroots pro-refugee European Solidarity initiatives, which emerged and have persisted since 2015, are fuelled by moments of moral vulnerability. As such, they offer a unique vantage point for investigating and problematizing the manifestations of what scholars of the autonomy of migration have termed "the crisis of Europe and its borders," in opposition to the media's dominant depiction of 2015 as a "migration crisis." Volunteers' acts of solidarity inherit but also challenge the dominant and culturally situated discourse on which goods should be sought and which bads must be fought, thereby putting dominant morality into question. In practice, European volunteers often confront the limits of 'the good' and tinker with its multiple and contextual nature, moving beyond European universalism. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2021 in Parisian solidarity networks for refugees, this paper demonstrates how various interpretations of 'the good' can coexist and come into conflict in the everyday dealings of these organizations, leading to significant changes and the subtle redefinition of 'the good' or the hierarchy of such goods. This often results in a departure from the European and universalist ideal of liberal equality. The paper thereby highlights the creativity and imagination of the volunteers and how they challenge the culturally dominant ways of doing good by paying attention to how new conceptions of good can emerge during moments of crisis with varying intensity and visibility. As such, it illustrates the tight links between moral vulnerability and the (un)doing of solidarity.