Peripheral humanitarianism

Ephemerality, experimentation, and effects of refugee provisioning in Paris

Bibliographic Data

ID4476497
AuthorsKavita Ramakrishnan (0000-0002-3794-756X, University of East Anglia), Tatiana A Thieme (0000-0002-0392-8141, University College London (UCL), UK, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume40
Issue5
Pages763-785
Publication date2022-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/02637758221124603
OpenAlexW4297394781
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited45

This article examines the place-based assemblages of humanitarian care, which emerge at neighbourhood scales in response to a wider politics of exclusion. We ground our discussion in the variegated humanitarian efforts and solidarities that took place in a working-class neighbourhood on the periphery of Paris, which brought into sharp relief the combination of precarity and provisioning in the wake of the 2015 'refugee crisis'. Drawing on ethnographic encounters, we recount the combination of reactive, emergency humanitarian logics (between 2016 and 2017) and experimental humanitarian strategies contesting wider exclusionary and deterrence-based asylum practices (2018 to the present). We show how modes of ephemeral and experimental humanitarianism operated across local spatiotemporal nodes - inside a welcome centre (the 'Bubble'), and on the surrounding streets. We argue that attention to the effects of the ephemeral and experimental solidarities and encounters that formed outside the formal infrastructure of humanitarian care in Paris were in part palliative, but profound in their re-imagining of a progressive politics of solidarity amidst protracted and overlapping precarities. We propose peripheral humanitarianism to describe these effects, a spatially and temporally contingent humanitarian assemblage engaging with both traditional and DIY humanitarian responses that challenges structural exclusions of racialized 'others

Computer security · Criminology · Ephemeral key · Humanitarian aid · Neighbourhood (mathematics · Place making · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Precarity · Refugee · Sociology · Solidarity · Gender Studies · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Sex work and related issues

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