, this paper brings together recent discussions of over-research in refugee communities with theorisations of the 'humanitarian infrastructure', defined as the ensemble of technologies and spaces through which refugee migration and its governance are mediated and reproduced. It argues that engagements with the question of over-research in geography need to focus on the material conditions that make 'access to the field' possible, leading to some places and people being far more researched than others. In the case of refugee research in the Global South, these conditions are often linked to the infrastructures of international humanitarianism, from international hotels to translation services. In increasingly unstable and 'closed' research settings, such as refugee settlements in North Africa and the Middle East, researchers' presence, it is shown, often both relies on and feeds into the local infrastructures and economies associated with the humanitarian enterprise. Implications of the analysis for debates on access and 'closure' in dangerous field contexts are discussed.

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Recent research has highlighted the relevance of spaces of international aid and development as sites where global politics materializes. However, the position of local aid workers within these spaces remains less explored. Drawing on fieldwork with humanitarian professionals employed in responses to the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan and Lebanon, this paper theorizes the salience of labour and precarity in the geographies of contemporary humanitarian aid. The ethnographically informed argument is built through three main points: (1) unemployment and insecurity among locally recruited humanitarian staff; (2) the forms of care and affective labour that the aid sector mobilizes; and (3) racialized and classed relations within humanitarian spaces. I argue that the differential precarities experienced by aid workers reproduce a porous and contested 'local vs international' divide. While challenged by the 'new inclusions' brought about by the global expansion of the aid industry, this divide perpetuates entrenched exclusions and hierarchies, raising ethico-political concerns about the presumptions of abstract universality inherent to humanitarianism.

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