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Paper short abstract:

This paper pursues the thesis that in the civil society movement of refugee aid from 2015 a specific form of everyday life - care work - functions as the central practice complex with which the many and contradicting actors of the movement are held together into a whole.

Paper long abstract:

The motivations of the massive civil society movement of refugee aid of 2015 are diverse and seemingly contradictory. Some are explicitly political, others are not; some remain distant, some want to form close friendships with refugees. What held this broad coalition together? In this paper, based on fieldwork and interviews with a broad range of people involved with refugee aid in a southwest German town, I will argue that a specific form of everyday life is mobilized in order to bridge contradictions in the movement: care work. Pragmatic and urgent, care activities unfold their effect at the local level, potentially produce long-lasting, close social relationships (cf. Winker and Neumann 2019). It can run counter to “bureaucratic framings of vulnerability and deservingness” (Brković 2020:226), resulting in a utopian spillover by enlarging the scope of action (cf. Huke 2019) and shared feelings of success and/or frustration, which has the potential to link up the different actors of the movement. The “tactical de-politicization” (Adam 2018:315) of the care work means a common focus on the specific care work that bridges political differences and creates new alliances. The concept of care work opens up a twofold historical perspective: 1. the strong presence of women in the movement testifies to the history of the gendering of care work; 2. it opens questions of the relation of care work to protest work in refugee solidarity movements over time. Does care work play a larger role in 2015 compared to the 1980s and 1990s?