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Paper short abstract

This paper examines everyday survival among Afghan refugees as a form of practical bricolage, showing how people assemble housing, work, and documents from the fragmented resources of asylum regimes.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines everyday survival among Afghan refugees as a form of practical bricolage, drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of bricolage as a craft that assembles workable arrangements from limited and heterogeneous materials rather than from coherent plans or stable resources (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 2021). Based on ethnographic research with Afghan refugees living under legal precarity in European and transit contexts, the paper focuses on how people construct livable, if temporary, futures by recombining fragmented elements of asylum regimes, informal and semi-formal labor, humanitarian assistance, family obligations, and transnational support networks.

Rather than approaching these practices through resilience or adaptation frameworks, the paper asks how refugees identify, evaluate, and repurpose the “odds and ends” of asylum systems such as expired or temporary documents, partial recognition of skills, short-term housing arrangements, and intermittent NGO support into usable configurations of everyday life, how these material assemblages shape refugees’ temporal horizons, balancing immediate survival with uncertain long-term possibilities, and how survival depends on constant recalibration rather than linear progress.

The paper argues that everyday survival operates as a form of practical bricolage that neither overcomes nor escapes structural uncertainty but renders it temporarily inhabitable. By foregrounding bricolage as a mode of future-making under constraint, the paper contributes a fine-grained account of how Afghan refugees craft livable lives in the absence of coherent trajectories of return, integration, or mobility (Hage 2009).