Coordinating a crisis: Activist volunteers in Europe’s so-called “refugee” crisis
In this talk, I will explore how activist volunteers made decisions to intervene (and to stay and continue) in what they regarded as an intensifying humanitarian and/or political crisis in Greece in 2015/16. I will offer a thick description of what has variously been called “solidarity humanitarianism,” “grassroots humanitarianism,” “subversive humanitarianism,” “makeshift humanitarianism,” “citizen aid.” My aim is not so much to assess this movement’s ideological purity or to declare a new form of political subjectivity/mode of civic engagement, but more to try to understand some of the diverse, complicated, ambivalent fantasies, demands, desires, and negotiations in the moral/political ambiguity at the membrane of crisis and care. I am interested in what these aspects suggest about the nature of the overlapping crises in which volunteers were already enmeshed and those into which they became embedded; the varying discourses of help, care, and solidarity on which they relied to make sense of what they were getting into/developing; and what forms of Becoming/Being, relationship, care, and resistance these formations opened up or foreclosed.
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