Countering Indeterminate Temporariness: Sheltering work in refugee camps

Abstract

The experience of temporariness is increasingly prevalent across the world, both for transient populations such as refugees and in work life characterized by precarious employment relationships. In this article, we examine how local institutional work can shape people’s experience of indeterminate temporariness and mitigate its pernicious effects. Our qualitative, inductive study is set in refugee camps in Lebanon, where indeterminate temporariness created an oppressive experience of time among Syrian refugees. We document the efforts of an NGO to help refugees rebuild meaningful lives by developing small-scale entrepreneurial ventures—efforts we conceptualize as “sheltering work”. Our analysis points to the potential for sheltering work to alleviate the oppressive effects of temporariness by bounding, containing, and structuring individuals’ day-to-day lives. Although sheltering work reshaped refugees’ experience of time, it did not eradicate the oppressive effects of indeterminate temporariness; instead, oppressive and reclaimed experiences of time co-existed, with individuals shifting between them. Our study theorizes sheltering work as a potent form of modest, local institutional work in the face of immutable institutions, and elaborates how individual experiences of time influence embedded agency.

Strangers at the Bedside: Solidarity-making to address institutionalized infrastructural inequalities

“…Helfen & Sydow, 2013) and non-profit organizations (e.g. Kodeih et al, 2023) may represent or give voice to marginalized actors' interests. However, such representations relegate the marginalized as part of a problem to be solved rather than as active problem-solvers.…”

“…First, research emphasizes actors’ social, political, cultural and technical skills (Fligstein, 1997; Perkmann & Spicer, 2007) or delineates that actors with sufficient resources or occupying enabling subject positions (Battilana, 2006) are always already equipped to address certain social problems. However, given that individuals’ social position and status shape their agency (Battilana, 2006), marginalized actors encounter material and symbolic barriers through institutional arrangements, which are tough to disrupt (Kodeih, Schildt, & Lawrence, 2023). Martí and Fernández (2013, p. 1196) highlight that there is ‘[i]nsufficient attention to what goes on at the margin and the extremes’, thus eliding specific kinds of work that affect institutional arrangements.…”

“…Powerful actors may dominate collaborations, influencing the rules of the game and breaking down coordinated action (Nicholls & Huybrechts, 2016). Participation and consensual decision-making may demand time, effort and emotional intensity (Varman & Chakrabarti, 2004), and indeterminate temporariness hampers such participation (Kodeih et al, 2023). Moreover, institutional research has privileged a conflict-based perspective, with actors ‘competing in a battle on institutional change’ (Helfen & Sydow, 2013, p. 1076).…”

Control Through Violence: A situational analysis of embodied practices of violence in a refugee reception centre

“…We explore control through violence in the ‘extreme context’ (Hällgren et al, 2018, p. 111) of the total institution of a refugee camp (on refugee camps, more generally, see also Alkhaled & Sasaki, 2022; Dykstra-DeVette & Canary, 2019; Kodeih, Schildt, & Lawrence, 2023). In Asylums , Goffman (1961) develops how total institutions constitute an ideal-type for a range of organisations, such as ‘army barracks, ships, boarding schools’ (p. 5) – and, we would add, refugee camps (see also La Chaux, Haugh, & Greenwood, 2018).…”

Organizing for Social and Institutional Change in Response to Disruption, Division, and Displacement: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…While members of post-industrial societies are not accustomed to envisioning that the institutions on which they depend are quite this vulnerable, recent global experience with DDD has shown rich and poor alike that “business as usual” is often no longer possible. For example, Kodeih, Schildt, and Lawrence (2022) reveal how international agencies can engage in “sheltering work” as a way to help refugees survive when institutions fail. Another example of widespread disruption and erosion of the “institutional fabric” (Hwang & Höllerer, 2020) globally is, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic; but during the same period, wildfires, heat domes, dire droughts, or inundations—all made worse by climate change—have threatened lives, altered food systems, and fueled political instability and civil uprisings.…”