Grassroots humanitarianism, refugee artisans and the gendered construction of solidarity

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Challenging conventional constructions of gender, activism and accountability

Proposal

This research project seeks to understand the complexities of forced migration, transnational solidarity, and affective labour from the perspective of humanitarian intermediaries – western-situated individuals who work to support refugee communities through grassroots, consumption-oriented advocacy work. This research project also involves an inspection of humanitarian objects to illuminate the material culture of aid – the prominent use of homemade and handcrafted items as vehicles for promoting and embodying solidarity. Specifically, this paper will explore the ways charitable product lines work to invoke an ethic of care between the western-situated consumer (positioned as an agent of change) and the refugee producer (presented as deserving of investment) – and connects them through stereotypical forms of feminine commodity (beaded bracelets, embroidered scarves).

To illustrate this style of appeal, Canadian social enterprise ‘Me to We’ (2018) introduces a line of ‘Rafiki bracelets’ as follows:

"Every piece of Artisans jewellery is handmade by a woman in Kenya. Using traditional skills passed down from Mama to Mama, her hands create the one-of-a-kind piece you hold in yours. With each bead and stitch, she earns her way to a better life – she can send her children to school, feed them what they need to grow up strong and healthy, perhaps even start her own business. ME to WE Artisans empowers her to take control of her life, and transform her family’s future."

The values, expectations and logics which undergird these narratives are flush with analytical potential. Focusing on object biographies, and following Scott-Smith (2013), one might consider the notion of ‘commodity fetishism,’ whereby humanitarian objects are positioned as wholly transformative interventions possessing some form of ‘mystical authority’ and “appearing themselves as the solution, as though the object alone is responsible for success” (p. 926, italics in original). Focusing on the aid recipient, one might draw parallels to Ilcan and Rygiel’s (2015) description of ‘resiliency humanitarianism,’ a discursive technique “rationalized through progressive sounding concepts of empowerment, partnership, building community, participation, and self-reliance” which seeks to reframe the beneficiary as an entrepreneurial subject (p. 347). Finally, focusing on the western-situated consumer, and drawing inspiration from Koffman, Orgad and Gill (2015), one might consider how ‘sisterly solidarity’ becomes mobilized within humanitarian communication and to what effect, including the frequently twinned “construction of girls as both ideal victims and ideal agents of change” (p. 157).

In this paper, I endeavour to connect growing interdisciplinary scholarship on (1) the constructed and truncated representations of ‘third world women’ which proliferate development discourse (Dogra, 2011; Mohanty, 1998; Sensoy & Marshall, 2010), (2) the upsurge of informal, grassroots or vernacular forms of humanitarian praxis (McGee & Pelham, 2018; Pantti, 2015; Sandri, 2018) and (3) the generation and consumption of objects with an explicit humanitarian purpose (Budabin, 2017; Li, 2017; Scott-Smith, 2013, 2018; Redfield, 2016; Richey & Ponte, 2011). While some literature is available on each of these sub-themes, this paper is unique in examining its intersection.

This empirical study builds upon Malkki’s (2015) decade of ethnographic research amongst Finnish humanitarians and analysis of three humanitarian craft campaigns: ‘Aid bunnies,’ ‘trauma teddies’ and ‘Mother Teresa blankets.’ In this case, humanitarian objects were knitted or crocheted by the benefactor as a gift for those in distant need. In concert with Malkki (2015), I am interested in homemade and handmade objects as forms of distant care-giving – as well as how these objects become entangled with the domestic-feminine and represent “an enchanted connectivity” (p. 108). In my own research, I propose a crucial inversion; shifting the focus onto items which are fashioned by the aid recipient and made available for purchase to western-situated consumers.

Here I ask: How do humanitarian intermediaries make meaning of their advocacy work? What narratives are constructed about or invested into objects produced with an explicit humanitarian purpose? How is ‘solidarity’ imagined and communicated within refugee awareness or fundraising settings (through verbal, visual and digital mediums)?

Methodologically, in keeping with my interest in visual, online and narrative methodology, this research integrates a diverse repertoire of qualitative techniques – attending community-based refugee awareness or fundraising events (where product booths are often a feature), a content analysis of related product websites, blogs and social media platforms, and semi-structed interviews with humanitarian intermediaries. Within this setting, humanitarian objects are valuable as both standalone visual-sensory texts (including, for example, physical tags with written preambles attesting to the project’s origin and/or beneficiary), but also as an integral prompt for verbal storytelling (directly incorporated into and reflected upon during the interview framework).

Theoretically, this investigation is situated within the broader postfeminist discourse of ‘girl power’ and the concurrent neo-liberalization, depoliticization and corporatization of the humanitarian field (Koffman, Orgad & Gill, 2015). However, the project further engages a broad range of sociologically-relevant concepts and debates, including power and agency, borders and (im)mobility, and affect and embodiment.

Overall, my intention is to reveal the aspirations and complexities of humanitarian intervention within a North American setting, as citizens grapple with the implications of a global refugee crisis. The study contributes to scholarly understandings of the western public’s moral responses to distant suffering – what Heron (2007) refers to as the ‘helping imperative.’ Simultaneously, by incorporating a participatory visual analysis of objects (Mitchell, 2010; Mitchell, De Lange, & Moletsane, 2017; Pillay, Pithouse-Morgan, & Naicker, 2017; Pink, 2004, 2015; Turkle, 2011), this paper demonstrates the promise of creative methodological practices and their ability to illuminate largely uncharted topics within humanitarian scholarship. Indeed, while debate within this field has attended to “moral principles, institutional politics, global coordination and political economy…the material elements of relief remain relatively neglected” (Scott-Smith, 2013, p. 914).

Author

• Kaylan Schwarz, University of Guelph