The workshop critically examines the geographies of humanitarianism, exploring the relationship between labor, care, and governance. We engage the concept of “precarious humanitarianism” (Saltsman 2022) to interrogate how humanitarian care—mobilized through both paid and unpaid labor by refugees, migrants, volunteers, aid workers, and professionals in contexts of displacement and the diaspora operates within systems of extraction and control while also offering possibilities for meaningful integration, resistance and transformation. Precarious humanitarianism explores the entanglement of humanitarian efforts with colonial and neoliberal power structures, including the racialized and gendered division of care work (Fluri & Lehr 2017; Pascucci 2018; Ramsay 2020; Avgeri 2024). Humanitarianism often depends on intimate, affective, and relational forms of care, offering a countertopography to aid. Yet, these same relations are frequently instrumentalized to sustain aid and arrival infrastructures that reproduce global inequalities and uphold hierarchies of race, citizenship, and labor. Deploying the concept of “salvage accumulation” (Tsing, 2015), we identify the interfaces where noncapitalist relations of help and care are appropriated within capitalist aid and integration regimes. We also look critically at humanitarian governance in terms of increasingly hostile border and migration management policy frameworks and institutional practices, broader shifts in the political economy, and the possibilities for pushing alternative human and mobility-centered approaches to aid that are rooted in a politics of solidarity.
Program
Thursday, 11 June
10:30 – Introductions & Coffee (available throughout the day, also for the audience)
11:00 – 12:00
The European Union as a Humanitarian Border: How the New Pact on Migration and Asylum Produces Vulnerability through Care, Control, and Conditional Protection
Jouni Häkli (Tampere University)
Discussant: Austin Crane
12:00 – 13:00
How voluntary is voluntary return? The precarious humanitarianism of return counseling amidst the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum
Austin Crane (University of South Carolina)
Discussant: Jouni Häkli
13:00 – 14:00 – Lunch
14:00 – 15:00
Laboring for Change: A political economic analysis of the paid and unpaid labor of diaspora humanitarianism
Adam Saltsman (Worcester State University)
Discussant: Elisa Pascucci
15:00 – 16:00
Within and beyond technocratic infrastructures: labour in “projectified” international aid
Giacomo Guizzardi (University of Bologna) & Elisa Pascucci (Tampere University)
Discussant: Adam Saltsman
19:00 – Dinner
Friday, 12 June
09:30 – Settling in & Coffee (available throughout the day, also for the audience)
10:00 – 11:00
Cultivating Otherwise: Gardening, Care, and Belonging in a Refugee Community Garden
Banu Gökarıksel (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Discussant: Olga Tkach
11:00 – 12:00
Connective labour of volunteer mediation: enacting homestay accommodation for displaced people beyond hosting households
Olga Tkach (University of Helsinki)
Discussant: Banu Gökarıksel
12:00 – 13:30 – Lunch
13:30 – 14:30
Educational spaces as arrival infrastructures: education, socialization, and the significance of (un)caring relationships
Kirsi Pauliina Kallio (Tampere University)
Discussant: Elisa Pascucci or Banu Gökarıksel
14:30 – 15:30
Roundtable discussion: pathways for future collaboration
Read more about the presentations: Hum in Crisis_TUNI_abstracts
If you have any questions, please contact Professor Kirsi Pauliina Kallio (kirsipauliina.kallio[at]tuni.fi)
References
Avgeri, D. (2024). Humanitarian capitalism: The labour regime of aid and the surrogate welfare state in times of global displacement. Political Geography, 114.
Fluri J. and Lehr R. (2017) The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American–Afghan Entanglements: Intimate Development, Geopolitics and the Currency of Gender and Grief. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Pascucci, E. (2018). The local labour building the international community: Precarious work within humanitarian spaces. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 51(3), 743-760.
Ramsay, G. (2020). Humanitarian exploits: Ordinary displacement and the political economy of the global refugee regime. Critique of Anthropology, 40(1) 3–27
Saltsman, A. (2022). Border Humanitarians: Gendered Order and Insecurity on the Thai-Burmese Frontier. Syracuse University Press.
Tsing, A. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press