This paper frames the political import of refugees' material practices in Kakuma Refugee Camp through critical reflection on Eyal Weizman's notion of the humanitarian present. To begin, I explore how the production of the refugee camp as a space of containment takes place not through a unified humanitarian calculus, but through a set of articulated practices undertaken by various actors-governments, police, aid agencies, host populations, and refugees-all of which have profoundly material manifestations. Secondly, I argue that refugees' pursuits of material well-being through semilicit and illicit means should be read as a practical material critique of the declining standards of humanitarian support. These efforts to achieve sustenance, invest in the future, and exert autonomy serve as a public reminder that humanitarian assistance fails to meet the minimum standard to ensure human existence, and that refugees aim for something more than mere survival.

Violence and humanitarianism are conventionally understood to be in opposition to one another. And yet, humanitarianism is also deeply entangled with violence-not only in tending to the after effects of human or natural catastrophe, but, at times, also (re)producing and perpetuating ongoing conditions of violence. Taking up Weizman's notion critiquing "lesser evil" solutions to human suffering, we extend the exploration of humanitarian interventions to the structural and symbolic violences enacted through the institutions, mechanisms, instruments, and "moral technologies" that are mobilized in the governance of people and spaces deemed in "need." At the same time we attend to the thresholds within humanitarian forms of engagement where slippage into assaultive violence condenses-often through the spatial policing of circulation, the drive toward legibility, and/or opaque processes of conditional vetting. These moments and spaces shed light on the multiple, hierarchical visions of humanity that animate humanitarianism.

In this paper, I take up diverse ways in which the uncertain future mobilises action in the now, and consider what kinds of socialities and economies such actions toward the future produce. Thinking from the vantage point of Juba, South Sudan, I show how the openness of space and time to emergence shape the everyday practices of anticipating, hedging for and living through a future and present that is radically uncertain. I argue that the defining features of such everyday hedging are (i) an implicitly spatial frame of comparison, (ii) a fraught interdependence between lack of reliable knowledge and calculative practices and finally (iii) their capacity to generate value in the face of risk. I consider futurity and elsewheres as modalities of difference – that is, as conditions for the unfolding of becoming and the emergence of the new, as well as requirements for surprise. Although Juba may be considered a limit case, I argue that practices of everyday hedging – whatever their particularities – are critical to better understanding futurity and the complex socialities on which the economic relies.

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Often, before we, as researchers, set foot in the field, we have planned out in detail the ways in which we will go about our work -theoretically informed research methods have been carefully chosen, and plans for entry into the field are well made. But what about how we actually move in the field? Certainly, the logistics of arriving at our chosen site are seen to, but how can our daily mode of transportation -be it our feet, a bicycle, taxi or Land Rover -impact our research? Because sometimes footing it is the only option, I here explore the politics of walking in the field.My decision to walk in the field was not one I theorized deeply. Simply the challenges of getting to my field site -bureaucratic opacity, the possibility of visa denials, insecurity on the roads, and a last minute change in the research location -had occupied most of my thoughts in the months and weeks leading up to beginning fieldwork in a small and remote town in South Sudan 1 . The mere fact of arriving seemed like a major accomplishment in itself. But after a much needed rest from the two-day bone jangling journey, I was itching to see the place where I would spend more than six months conducting ethnographic research on the impact of refugee return migration on livelihood practices and everyday life. So I did what seemed automatic to me. I took a walk. Little did I know at the time, but my decision to 'foot it' (the local term for walking) would have a profound effect on my research; not just how it was perceived, but also the kinds of questions that I would be able to pose and the data that I would gather.The morning after I arrived, I set out on foot from the NGO compound that would be my home, at least for the first few months of research. That first walk was a bit of a spectacle. I was met with numerous greetings and even more stares. Some teenagers followed me around for a while. All of this didn't surprise me, since I assumed that in a small town most newcomers are noticed, and as a white woman my presence in the town was certainly notable. Walking the few kilometres into the heart of town, I was overwhelmed. I wanted my eyes to be everywhere, to take in the people and the place.The town was somehow both bigger and smaller than I had expected. The road, I was told, had recently been re-graded. Along its path a young man was rebuilding a fence that had been damaged by the road work. A tree of enormous proportions provided shade for an informal market, a bar, and a meeting place; public notices were fixed to its trunk. The road *