While recognizing that “volunteering for refugees” is entangled in ethical and political power dimensions, this paper will discuss how we can ethnographically explore the practices of volunteers as shaped in intrinsic ways by their mode of being in the world as ethically concerned human beings (cf. Malkki 2015). The act of helping can be problematized to an extent where efforts of doing good are questioned as euro-centric, selfish and ego-altruistic. This approach to the study of volunteering overlooks other aspects, such as: Which relations and new roles are mobilised in the process of doing volunteer refugee reception work and how are usual divisions between researchers and interlocutors, refugees and volunteers, guests and hosts, as well as academic, activist and humanitarian interventions, renegotiated? Which methodological and analytical implications do these interchanging relations have for ethnographic research? Approaching the study of volunteers beyond a humanitarianism perspective, we explore how to better understand the practices of volunteers through the lens of doubt, complexities of hope and melancholia.
The presentation is part of the interdisciplinary research network Helping Hands: Research Network on the on the Everyday Border work of European Citizens (DFF/6107-00111): https://saxoinstitute.ku.dk/research/research_projects_and_networks/helping-hands-research-network-on-the-everyday-border-workk-of-european-citizens/