"Organized Spaces of Encounter. Between Social Romance and Emancipatory Political Project"
More than 10,000 Belgian residents have welcomed and accommodated arriving and transiting undocumented migrants in recent years. Individual volunteers took responsibility and cared for, about, and with people who are denied access to formalized professional care provision and are facing substantial care deficiencies. In the intimate space of the home and the family, new informal caring arrangements and caring relations are established. This involves a great deal of physical and emotional labor for all involved and often leads to overwhelm and exhaustion. In my qualitative empirical research I focus on these caring relations and ask how the strangers encounter each other, how they care for each other and how they engage with the ambivalences of care, responsibility and interdependency. Applying a feminist care ethics approach, I understand these precarious caring arrangements as yet another expression of the lack of sufficient and adequate caring resources on a societal level ('care crisis'). Therefore, I turn to the underlying unequal relations of power, that is the mechanisms, structures, and institutions that foster the uneven distribution of care and responsibility.
Rivka Saltiel has been working as a university assistant at the Department of Geography and Spatial Research at Karl-Franzens-University Graz since 2018. She studied Cultural Anthropology (Graz, Vienna) and subsequently completed the 4cities Master in Urban Studies (Brussels, Vienna, Copenhagen, Madrid). Rivka is doing her PhD on organised spaces of encounter (in public space, micro-public spaces and private housing) in the city and discusses them in terms of their transformative political potential.