Getting (Dis)organized : The Ordinariness of Extreme in a South Sudanese Refugee Camp

• In Event: Organizational Communication Research Escalator - Extended Session

Abstract

With this paper, I firstly would like to address the very notion of extreme context by challenging the way many scholars are framing it from “outside” (Comfort & Okada, 2013; Comfort, 2002). This methodological posture certainly allows reconstructing the situation/moment/event (Weick, 1993, 1997) and can surely be very instructive at times. Nonetheless, I argue for a more hands-on perspective regarding extreme contexts and other so-called chaotic environments, implying the researchers’ full presence in the field.

Furthermore, I argue that such contexts tend to represent a somehow exotic place in our minds. It is said to be dangerous, intense, powerful, thrilling, risky and so on. Thus, extreme contexts are primarily envisaged as constituted of unexpected and chaotic events (Cunha, Clegg & Camoche, 2006). But what about the daily routines, the ongoing (dis)organizing and the ordinariness of such circumstances? Consequently, I propose with this paper to empirically illustrate, from an ethnographic perspective, daily scenes and interactions where I was myself forced to go on with my routines and daily activities but nonetheless confronted with many struggles.

Author

• Frederik Matte, U Ottawa