Friday, April 15, 2016
Concerto A (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
This paper will engage with what many critiques have considered de-politicised spaces, namely service-oriented, hegemonic, white-normed NGOs close to the state, operating in the field of migration. Drawing on interviews in the UK, the Netherlands and Austria with racialised NGO staff members who share a similar migration trajectory with their so-called ‘clients’, I will trace the ways in which they demonstrate affective solidarities. I will situate the interview narratives in relation to two distinct neoliberal moments: first, NGOs increasingly operate according to a logic of competition and efficiency, providing cheap labour where the state falls short in its welfare provision. Secondly, under neoliberalism equal opportunities or affirmative action approaches have given way to diversity management, in which being ‘different’ has come to be seen as a resource that can make (non-profit) organisations more productive. In the light of these neoliberal ‘imperatives’, these racialized and deskilled NGO workers get framed as offering ‘intercultural competences’, and ‘language skills’ and provide a source for providing productive labour as ‘social-worker-cum-interpreter’. In this paper, I will argue however, that these NGO workers push the boundaries of what constitutes ‘productive’ knowledge and manage to politicize their experiences in the context of their role. At the same time, I will suggest that the affective capacities that they draw on, based on their own experiences of migration, flight and discrimination, are fragile in a context in which ‘professionalism’ is marked by white masculinity and the status of ‘model migrant’ is imbued with individualized resilience that ignores structural inequalities.
