The role of affect in makeshift camps: assemblages of care, solidarity and humanity in Greece

Elisabeth Kritsiglou, Durham University

Abstract : This paper discusses the politics of care, solidarity and humanity in the makeshift refugee camp of Piraeus, Greece in 2016. It concentrates on partial and ambivalent, unofficial aid encounters between refugees and different categories of local Greek people, and demonstrates that these encounters were filled with affective tensions between cultural, historical and political positionalities. The paper argues in favour of the importance of the analytical role of affect for a nuanced understanding of makeshift camps as complex, multimodal spaces composed of assemblages of discourses, practices, processes and materialities, such as tents, registration papers, smells or securitising structures. The notion of the assemblage is employed to illuminate the distributed, polymorphous and malleable character of affect. The paper claims that affect can be seen as a component of diverse sets of relations between persons and things, but also histories, processes and cultural norms. As part of different relational assemblages, affect produces diverse interactional affordances and outcomes.

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Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies