‘Friends that last a lifetime’: the importance of emotions amongst volunteers working with refugees in Calais

Abstract

The European 'refugee crisis' has generated a broad movement of volunteers offering their time and skills to support refugees across the continent, in the absence of nation states. This article focuses on volunteers who helped in the informal refugee camp in Calais called the 'Jungle'. It looks at the importance of emotions as a motivating factor for taking on responsibilities that are usually carried out by humanitarian aid organizations. We argue that empathy is not only the initial motivator for action, but it also sustains the voluntary activity as volunteers make sense of their emotions through working in the camp. This type of volunteering has also created new spaces for sociability and community, as volunteers have formed strong emotional and relational bonds with each other and with the refugees. Finally, this article contributes to the growing body of literature that aims at repositioning emotions within the social sciences research to argue that they are an important analytical tool to understand social life and fieldwork.

Who Deserves Compassion? The Moral and Emotional Dilemmas of Volunteering in the ‘Refugee Crisis’

“…The vast movement of refugee support that has emerged across Europe as a result of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ has been the subject of growing scholarly attention (Agustín and Bak Jorgensen, 2019; Armbruster, 2019; Della Porta, 2018; Feischmidt et al, 2019; Fontanari and Borri, 2017; Youkhana and Sutter, 2017). The literature has focused on the emergence and nature of this volunteer-based movement (De Jong and Ataç, 2017; Sandri, 2018; Zamponi, 2017), its relationship to political action (Fleischmann and Steinhilper, 2017; Vandevoordt and Verschraegen, 2019) and the role of emotions in mobilising participants (Armbruster, 2019; Doidge and Sandri, 2018; Karakayali, 2017; Sirriyeh, 2018). In particular, these studies show how compassion is a central emotion that motivates a variety of actors to participate in the movement, as well as how this emotion shapes the nature of civil society response to the ‘refugee crisis’ (Armbruster, 2019; Kleres, 2018; Sirriyeh, 2018).…”

“…We will show that, while volunteers often tend to endorse and reproduce charity, governmental and media discourses around deservingness, pro-refugee volunteering is often characterised by tensions and dilemmas. For example, they might experience emotional difficulties when dealing with the traumatic pasts and the suffering of migrants (Doidge and Sandri, 2018) or when witnessing behaviours they might disapprove of (Malkki, 2015; Willemez, 2002). In other cases, volunteers might also become uncomfortable with the increasingly disciplinary attitudes of certain NGOs (Armbruster, 2019).…”

Beyond Humanitarian Logics: Volunteer-Refugee Encounters in Chios and Paris

“…Many volunteers saw such encounters as one of interactions generated an intense sense of "empathy" such that "inhuman conditions for refugees" came to be "seen as an attack on the individual volunteer." 72 This affective investment, in turn, fueled their humanitarian work, with teams frequently working late nights, running emergency distributions, driven by a palpable sense that "our friends" could not be left alone when the rains had flooded their makeshift homes and anger directed towards the state, UNHCR or NGOs for failing to provide basic protection.…”

Evaluating the motivation of Red Cross Health volunteers in the COVID-19 pandemic: a mixed-methods study protocol

“…2 3 Studies have identified multiple factors shaping volunteer motivations: a volunteer's sense of self-worth in volunteering; the expansion and strengthening of social relations; the acquisition of career-related experience; adherence to the organisation's goals, for instance. [4][5][6][7][8][9] One qualitative interpretive meta-synthesis evaluated five qualitative studies of crisis counselling volunteers and found six cross-cutting themes shaping motivation. 10 They identified a desire to make an 'external difference'; 'volunteer existentialism', which referred to pursuing an activity to gain understanding of their own lives and to achieve connectedness with other people; 'lived experience', pertaining to experiences of suffering and meanings that volunteers attributed to these experiences through volunteering; achievement of a sense of personal fulfilment through volunteer work; and finally, 'lack of direction' and 'lack of support' from superiors within the organisation, which reduced motivation.…”