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Paper short abstract:

In this lecture I focus on the developments and changes in a project – the Sewing Café – that I have co-organized and have been involved in since the beginning. In connection with Orientalism and Eurocentrism I focus on changes in this space from a post-colonial perspective.

Paper long abstract:

This lecture is based on a small part of my PhD project titled New boom of refugees supportwork. Between Welcome Culture and Refugees Welcome.

In this lecture I focus on the developments and changes in a project – the Sewing Café – that I have co-organized and have been involved in since the beginning. In connection with Orientalism and Eurocentrism (see Said and Chakrabarty) I analyze othering processes from a post-colonial perspective.

I am going to show how the white-German "helpers" in this space, who (consciously or unconsciously) have "helpfulness" in their self-images, construct themselves as complete and without fundamental deficiencies. In form of the Sewing Café they have created a space that I would call a space of helping. Asylum seekers are constructed as helpless, needy and weak "others" in this space of helping.

At the same time, I will address how the asylum seekers have changed and developed this space of helping to a space of interaction, participation and enjoying.

As the social space is a living phenomenon, from this perspective I am looking at the developments, changes and entanglements in the power / knowledge complex manifested herein. I am pursuing the questions of how affiliations and exclusions are / were formed in this space, how the relevant boundaries, changes and contradictions proceed and were constructed, but also how this space is opened up and how these are related to or interact with each other.