- Convenors:
-
Barbara Sorgoni
(University of Turin)
Lorenzo Vianelli (Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Network:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
The Panel examines the relations between humanitarian care and labour exploitation in Europe. In particular it seeks to highlight how reception measures for asylum seekers support, transform, or facilitate racialised and gendered processes of labour exploitation, dispossession, and disposability.
Long Abstract
In the last two decades, an extensive body of ethnographic research has crucially shed light on the complexities and tensions characterising humanitarian practices for the reception of asylum seekers. Important work has been produced on the conflation between rationales of care and control, the bureaucratisation of aid, the predicament of those employed in reception systems, the carcerality of asylum housing, and the temporality of waiting imposed on asylum seekers. While building on this scholarship, the panel aims to investigate the relations between humanitarian care and support to asylum seekers and processes of exploitation, dispossession, and disposability. Our goal is to highlight the ways in which reception measures may support, transform, or facilitate processes of labour exploitation. The session thus invites novel ethnographic contributions on the entanglement between humanitarian measures, racialisation processes, labour exploitation, and institutional abandonment in the European context, both during and after the provision of humanitarian assistance. Contributors should reflect at least on one of the following key issues:
The proliferation of spaces and situations of marginality, exploitation and abandonment, in which the experiences of refugees overlap with those of rejected asylum seekers, ‘irregular migrants’, economic migrants, and asylum seekers, thus making legal categorisations ineffective on the ground.
The continuities and differences between asylum seekers’ experiences during and after the asylum process, and the relation between reception systems and mainstream welfare services.
The impact of reception measures/facilities on labour markets and dynamics, particularly the ways in which reception policies interact with processes of labour exploitation, either by hindering or enabling them.