Governing Asylum:
Citizenship and Voluntarized Labor in Rural Austria
My PhD project investigates reconfigurations of citizenship that became manifest in voluntarized labor practices of migrant and non-migrant “volunteers” in Western Austria, following the crisis of refugee reception policies of 2015.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and situating its analysis historically, my thesis traces the processes of voluntarization through which different practices among people with different legal statuses in terms of residence and work rights came to be subsumed under the common category of “volunteering”. It thus develops a reading of voluntarized labor in the field of asylum and migration governance that contributes to debates in critical citizenship studies and to anthropological scholarship on labor and social reproduction. Through this approach, I challenge hegemonic frames of “volunteering” as “active participation”, “empowerment” and “civic contributions” that exclusively view voluntarized practices as related to issues of democracy in political practice.
I contribute to literature on “volunteering” in European refugee reception regimes and I address some of its shortcomings. This emerging body of literature largely focuses on resident volunteers, while "volunteering" by arriving forced migrants is mostly studied separately from other social groups and through distinct conceptual frames, which highlight concerns of "refugee integration". In addition, while paying attention to territorial unevenness by focusing on cities on different scalar positions, existing research tends to overlook regions that are conceived as "rural" and “marginal“ nodes of European migration governance regimes.
My research addresses these shortcomings as I focus on the Bregenzerwald region as such a seemingly marginal node, and I attend to its situatedness in evolving multi-scalar power relations. Further, I approach newly arriving and established resident volunteers through a common conceptual lens of citizenship and labor. This conceptual framework allows me to explore different voluntarized labor practices as spatially and historically situated, while paying attention to the different dynamics through which they are governed.
In my analysis, I treat the practices of migrant and non-migrant workers"volunteers” as historically and spatially embedded, and I shed light on the entanglements of their voluntarized labor with broader provision arrangements and processes of social reproduction in the region.The core arguments of my thesis posit that the volunteers' initiatives welcoming forced migrants I studied are not caused by "sudden waves" of solidarity, but instead voluntarized labor has long been an integral part of provision arrangementsin European asylum regimes, shaped by global processes of welfare state restructuring that extend beyond asylum governance and affect migrants and non-migrants alike.
Further, I argue, that the state is central to sorting social practices into different categories, such as "work", "volunteering" and "integration activities" through legal frameworks. In combination with social narratives and everyday practices, voluntarized labor is thus conceptualized in divergent ways: - as "active participation" for those who already hold residence rights, and - as "non-work" for those who do not and whose voluntarized labor is marked by coercive dynamics. In both cases, the labour entailed is devalued and its contribution to regional social reproduction rendered invisible.
My thesis thus highlights the importance of analyzing global humanitarian regimes as situated in concrete localities on the one hand and of expanding discussions on contemporary processes of social reproduction to include precarious migrant workers engaging with forms of voluntarized and invisibilized labor on the other, in order to understand how migrants and non-migrants alike are affected by the dynamics of reconfiguring capitalist relations in different locations.
NEXT PROJECT
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and situating its analysis historically, my thesis traces the processes of voluntarization through which different practices among people with different legal statuses in terms of residence and work rights came to be subsumed under the common category of “volunteering”. It thus develops a reading of voluntarized labor in the field of asylum and migration governance that contributes to debates in critical citizenship studies and to anthropological scholarship on labor and social reproduction. Through this approach, I challenge hegemonic frames of “volunteering” as “active participation”, “empowerment” and “civic contributions” that exclusively view voluntarized practices as related to issues of democracy in political practice.
I contribute to literature on “volunteering” in European refugee reception regimes and I address some of its shortcomings. This emerging body of literature largely focuses on resident volunteers, while "volunteering" by arriving forced migrants is mostly studied separately from other social groups and through distinct conceptual frames, which highlight concerns of "refugee integration". In addition, while paying attention to territorial unevenness by focusing on cities on different scalar positions, existing research tends to overlook regions that are conceived as "rural" and “marginal“ nodes of European migration governance regimes.
My research addresses these shortcomings as I focus on the Bregenzerwald region as such a seemingly marginal node, and I attend to its situatedness in evolving multi-scalar power relations. Further, I approach newly arriving and established resident volunteers through a common conceptual lens of citizenship and labor. This conceptual framework allows me to explore different voluntarized labor practices as spatially and historically situated, while paying attention to the different dynamics through which they are governed.
In my analysis, I treat the practices of migrant and non-migrant workers"volunteers” as historically and spatially embedded, and I shed light on the entanglements of their voluntarized labor with broader provision arrangements and processes of social reproduction in the region.The core arguments of my thesis posit that the volunteers' initiatives welcoming forced migrants I studied are not caused by "sudden waves" of solidarity, but instead voluntarized labor has long been an integral part of provision arrangementsin European asylum regimes, shaped by global processes of welfare state restructuring that extend beyond asylum governance and affect migrants and non-migrants alike.
Further, I argue, that the state is central to sorting social practices into different categories, such as "work", "volunteering" and "integration activities" through legal frameworks. In combination with social narratives and everyday practices, voluntarized labor is thus conceptualized in divergent ways: - as "active participation" for those who already hold residence rights, and - as "non-work" for those who do not and whose voluntarized labor is marked by coercive dynamics. In both cases, the labour entailed is devalued and its contribution to regional social reproduction rendered invisible.
My thesis thus highlights the importance of analyzing global humanitarian regimes as situated in concrete localities on the one hand and of expanding discussions on contemporary processes of social reproduction to include precarious migrant workers engaging with forms of voluntarized and invisibilized labor on the other, in order to understand how migrants and non-migrants alike are affected by the dynamics of reconfiguring capitalist relations in different locations.
NEXT PROJECT
Projektleitung
- Katrin Kremmel
Publications
2023 - ‘I take care and the state sabotages from the beginning to the end!’: tracing ‘volunteering’ in European provision arrangements for refugees and asylum seekers. Citizenship Studies, 27(4), 465–480. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2151570
2025 - On «integration activities». «Volunteering» among asylum seekers in western Austria as invisibilised labour, on "Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, Rivista quadrimestrale" 3/2025, pp. 457-478, doi: 10.3240/118727
2025 - On «integration activities». «Volunteering» among asylum seekers in western Austria as invisibilised labour, on "Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, Rivista quadrimestrale" 3/2025, pp. 457-478, doi: 10.3240/118727