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Paper short abstract

This essay weaves through media and auto-ethnographic reflection to dwell in moments of impasse produced in the social worlds around refugee solidarity in 2015-19 Athens, Greece—moments when people are bodily affected in a way that ethically prompts them toward actions not possible, or not enough.

Paper long abstract

Between 2015 and 2019, a social movement of support emerged, developed, and also disintegrated, as millions of people crossed Europe. Participants in this translocal movement and the social worlds that wove through it included anarchists expanding upon “NoBorder” networks, volunteers working with grassroots NGOs, refugees fleeing political persecution, and victims of non-targeted violence seeking sanctuary. In Athens, Greece, these stakeholders uneasily, impermanently came together in a networked field of “refugee solidarity” projects that crossed vast divides of political ideology and material capacity.

As first a participant and then an anthropologist studying the social worlds around refugee solidarity in Athens, I was consistently caught up in the contradictions and excesses that imbued the field—a community of people defined by precisely those binaries (“European” versus “migrant,” “refugee” versus “solidarian”) they sought to transcend. This essay is concerned with a fundamental mismatch between affect and ethics in political community-building in this field: What happens when people (refugees, solidarians, anthropologists) are bodily affected in a way that ethically prompts them towards actions (support, healing, representing, making visible) that are not possible, or where the scope of possible ethical activity can’t satisfy the affective push to act? I understand such moments as impasse, in the sense of irresolvable non-passage (Povinelli 2002) or affective and ethical “deadlock” (Mazzarella 2017). Weaving through published media as well as auto-ethnographic reflections on my own bodily and emotional reactions, this essay seeks to understand relationality in Athens refugee solidarity worlds by dwelling, momentarily, in the inevitability of impossibility.