Paper details

Paper authors	Ildikó Zakariás
In panel on	“Humanitarian borders” between care and control
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

The arrival of Middle-Eastern and African refugees in the last decades have resulted in the increase of jobs and positions in refugee and migrant services in various Western countries. Moreover, it also resulted in the increasing number of workers in these institutions having themselves a ’migrant background’ (Bauder-Jayaraman 2014, Zakariás-Feischmidt 2020). The institutional roles of these people as teachers, or social workers expect them to assist their refugee and migrant clients and students in ’integration’, often associated with finding education and employment on the labour market of the ’host society’. In the meantime, these migrant workers themselves experience the pressure to ’integrate’ and to prove their deservingness through their work, paid or voluntary. How do such discourses of deservingness related to work and employment affect the relationship between migrant workers and their refugee clients and students? What typical affective relations of care and control, e.g. empathetic identification or disciplining categorisations become mobilised by these double efforts to succeed on the labour market, by making others succeed? What are the implications of such affective relations on the governance of various migrant groups? These questions will be analysed using interviews with Central-East European migrants working in refugee services in Germany and Austria.

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