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Contribution short abstract

The paper explores care as an affective infrastructure shaping (in)communicability within vernacular humanitarianism. Focusing on refusal, silence, and opacity, it shows how affective demands produce hierarchies while opening fragile spaces to rethink care, responsibility, and relation.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution explores how affective infrastructures shape practices of care, refusal, and relationality within contexts of vernacular humanitarianism. Drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil, it approaches care not as a moral ideal or institutional framework, but as a relational regime through which proximity, obligation, and legitimacy are negotiated. In such settings, care is mediated through expectations of gratitude, transparency, and emotional legibility, and thus becomes a key site where racialized and classed distinctions are produced and sustained. Focusing on everyday encounters within humanitarian and bureaucratic assemblages, the paper examines how care functions as an affective infrastructure that organizes (in)communicability—determining who is heard, whose suffering is rendered intelligible, and whose opacity becomes suspect. These infrastructures do not merely enable support; they also expose subjects to moral evaluation and affective discipline, revealing how care can operate as both relation and regulation. Against this backdrop, I attend to moments of refusal, withdrawal, and silence as situated responses to such affective demands. Rather than treating these as communicative failures or forms of disengagement, I approach them as practices of affective self-protection that complicate dominant humanitarian grammars. In dialogue with emerging debates on incommunicability, I suggest that breakdowns in communication are not simply signs of polarization but key sites where the limits of care become visible. By tracing how care and its others are negotiated in everyday interactions, the paper reflects on how fragile and often ambivalent forms of relation may nonetheless open spaces for rethinking ethics, responsibility, and relationality within contemporary regimes of care.