2017 - Franco Angeli
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The Politics of Helping Refugees Emerging Meanings of Political Action around the German Summer of Welcome
53-73 p.
- In this paper, I search for new meanings of political action that have emerged around the so-called 'Summer of Welcome' in Germany in 2015, when more citizens than ever before were willing to volunteer for refugees by providing ostensibly 'apolitical' humanitarian help. In order to shed light on the volunteers' potentials to induce transformations towards a more egalitarian social and political order, I draw on several intriguing moments of my ethnographic field research in Southern Germany between 2014 and 2016. By doing so, I highlight how the volunteers - despite their ostensible self-understanding as 'apolitical' helpers - figure as Covert Activists, Change Agents or Political Dissidents. This will point at the dialectic relationship between 'the political' and 'the apolitical' and demonstrate how the humanitarian provides new avenues for political interventions, resistance and activism in future struggles around migration. [Publishers' text].
Is part of
Mondi migranti : 3, 2017-
Information
ISSN: 1972-4896
KEYWORDS
- Volunteering, Refugee Crisis, Humanitarianism, Germany, Political Activism, Civil Society, Migration Regime
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In this issue
- Changing contexts, persistent challenges : the political and social milieu of refugee and asylum seeker reception in Europe
- Introduction : civil society on the edge : actions in support and against refugees in Italy and Germany
- The Politics of Helping Refugees Emerging Meanings of Political Action around the German Summer of Welcome
- Mobilizing against the invasion : far right protest and the refugee crisis in Italy
- Practices of Solidarity : Direct Social Action, Politicisation and Refugee Solidarity Activism in Italy
- Anti-Islamism and beyond : Pegida
- Feeling the Refugee Crisis : Civic Mobilizations in Germany
- La criminalizzazione della solidarietà ai migranti in Val Roja : note dal campo
- International migration and environment : discussing the role of social remittances
- Scuole confessionali in Italia : il caso delle scuole musulmane
- Migration as a risk for security : risk frames in the Italian news on the Libya war and its aftermath
- Editoria e scrittori transculturali in Italia
- La mia esperienza con gli editori italiani
- Recensioni