The anti-racist potential of care - political dimensions of women’s engagement in voluntary refugee support work in Germany

Abstract

This article explores the role of gender in volunteering with refugees in Germany and how female volunteers, who outnumber male volunteers considerably, understand their involvement differently from men. Drawing upon quantitative data from two studies with volunteers in refugee work in Germany from 2015 and 2016, I discuss the motivations of female volunteers to engage in refugee support work, the meaning they give to their experience of working with refugees and the values they wish to demonstrate through their voluntary work. The article centrally maintains that refugee support work can be classed as a form of care work and is informed by an ethics and values of care. However, other results unveil that women interpret their care work as an expression of their political attitudes, specifically about anti-racism and antiright-wing activism, as well, and thereby have recourse to a supposedly male political justification for engaging in volunteering. Thus, this article argues that these two forms of motivation for volunteering, care and politics, do not need to be mutually exclusive. Crucially, voluntary refugee support work represents a unique opportunity for women's political activism for anti-racism and cultural openness.

A bibliometric analysis of cultural heritage research in the humanities: The Web of Science as a tool of knowledge management

“…As indicated by our analysis of the themes connected to cultural heritage and knowledge-oriented research, WOS-indexed cultural heritage research actively tackles the above-mentioned changes and timely challenges and concerns that impact not only the cultural heritage field but society more broadly (Su et al, 2019 ; Schmid, 2020 ). Moreover, the results of the co-occurrence analysis of authors’ keywords reflect the development of international cultural heritage governance and management and the focus points of international heritage conventions and charters from the past two decades, ranging from digital to intangible cultural heritage and from landscapes to the economic and social value of cultural heritage for society.…”

Local responses to hostility to new asylum seeker centres in Norway

“…It is exactly this lack of action by formal actors that was cited as the major motivation for the massive mobilization of civil society witnessed during this period, even among individuals with no prior history of volunteering (Karakayali & Kleist, 2015). Other scholars have identified individual motivations related to anti‐racist work (Schmid, 2020), solidarity, responsibility and care (Kemp, 2019; Vandevoort & Verschraegen, 2017).…”

Gender and the politics of maternalisms: Kinship-based imaginaries, responsibility and care in Australian refugee advocacy

“…Grandmaternalist naming in Australia is not confined to the asylum seeker/refugee movement advocates and supporters, however, but includes other groups of older women involved in various activisms, like the Grandmothers Against Removals (of First Nations children) and Knitting Nannas Against Gas and Greed (climate-change focused). In this they are part of a global phenomenon: overseas organisations invoking the grandmaternal trope include, among many, the Raging Grannies (Canada, US) and Raging Grannies International (Sawchuk, 2009); the Society of Fearless Grandmothers, Grandmothers for Peace and the Granny Peace Brigade (USA); Omas Gegen Rechts (Grandmothers Against the Right, Austria and Germany; Schmid, 2019); Grandmothers to Grandmothers (African AIDS orphans); the ‘Grandma Benches’ of Zimbabwe (local-level mental health providers); and climate activists the OmasForFuture.de (Grandmothers for the Future, Germany) and Grandmothers Act to Save the Planet (GASP, Canada). As I shall discuss, I have been especially interested in the ways in which such invocations of kin-based location – especially as ‘grandmothers’ ‘grannies’ ‘nannas’ – operate within these organisations, assuming both an overt symbolic and actual ‘familial’ responsibility for, and care of ‘Others’ and their futures within and beyond state and nation.…”