Men Who Care: Migrant-led responses to displacement in Greece

Across Greece, and in Athens especially, local 'solidarity' initiatives provide essential services to migrants/refugees, such as housing, education and healthcare. These initiatives are enacted by Greek citizens, international volunteers, and migrants/refugees themselves. They have received a lot of public, political and academic attention, and rightly so, as they are a vital resource for many people in Athens; particularly young migrant men. This is partly because of the disproportionate number of male migrants/refugees in Greece, who constitute around 70% of asylum registrations since 2013, of whom the majority (60%) are aged between 18 and 33 years old. However, the importance of these initiatives for young men is not only the result of their large numbers in the city, but also because they are much less able to access mainstream humanitarian aid. The concept of 'vulnerability', which is widely used by states and humanitarian agencies to distribute resources and access to rights, rarely recognises young and single men in these terms. In fact, single men are not only cast outside the humanitarian purview, but are widely seen as the perpetrators of violence in European imaginaries. The figure of the threatening migrant/refugee man is furthermore utilised by states to increase repressive interventions in ways that subject men to gender specific forms of violence, such as police violence, detention, and politically-induced homelessness.

Yet, while academic interest in migrants/refugees in Greece have been prolific in recent years, including the solidarity and resistance networks that have emerged, the role of gender in, especially, migrant men's responses to displacement has been largely overlooked in literature. This PhD project addresses this paucity by engaging with men as gendered subjects who experience and respond (positively) to social injustices. In particular, I argue that attention needs to be paid to men's caring practices as a form of political expression. The "politics of care" I develop here draws on Black feminist political and theoretical frameworks, which have long recognized the positive political power of community caregiving, particularly when practiced by individuals whom the state has denied basic rights. I find critical purchase in expanding this political framework of care to the Athenian context, where men are participating in and enacting a wide range of care-based initiatives. In doing so, this research will shine new light on migrant/refugee men's own oppositional agency, and the political implications of their community caregiving. Moreover, these care-based initiatives have potentially significant implications for how male roles, manhood and masculinity are constructed, performed and contested for and by migrant men.

The research is based on 12 months of overseas fieldwork in Athens. This will include participation in the support and solidarity networks that migrants have created and use to care for each other. It will also involve 25-30 semi-structured interviews and 4-5 focus groups with migrant male activists in Athens, that explore how, why and with what effect men in Athens are organising to create better lives for themselves and others in a context of forced displacement and political abandonment. This methodological approach fosters an attentiveness to the effects of a person's social location in different contexts, highlighting, in the case of my research, how inter alia age, race or class shape men's experiences of and responses to displacement. It also seeks to acknowledge the capacity of people with precarious immigration status to critically investigate their own social worlds, valuing lived experience in the production of social analysis.