Seminar: Making the ‘Vulnerable’ & the Human: Humanitarianism & Racialised Masculinities in Greece

Making the ‘Vulnerable’ & the Human: Humanitarianism & Racialised Masculinities in Greece

Greece remains an entry point into EUrope for people seeking protection. In this context, humanitarian organisations help determine who is worthy of care and support. In humanitarian work, the concept of vulnerability is used to organise attention and resources. This presentation focuses on the experiences and positions of single men seeking protection within vulnerability-centred humanitarian structures in Greece. It draws on interviews with humanitarian practitioners and single men seeking protection, along with document analysis and autoethnographic insights from my previous work as a humanitarian practitioner in Greece.

The presentation demonstrates how single men are complexly excluded from vulnerability- centred humanitarian structures. It unveils how single men are racialised and gendered in complex ways and how this serves to justify the denial of essential services to them. Focusing on the materials, practices and conceptions that make up the humanitarian operationalisation of vulnerability, the presentation details how humanitarian practitioners are (re)shaping what it means to be a person deserving of protection. It argues that the denial of services works to exclude men not just from the humanitarian conception of vulnerability, but it also serves to exclude single men from the very notion of human. To this end, it argues that the humanitarian frame of vulnerability is built upon and works to (re)produce exclusionary conceptions of the human, which are already connected to colonial legacies, particularly racial and gender hierarchies. Ultimately, the presentation uncovers how the humanitarian operationalisation of vulnerability determines who is deemed deserving of life and the conditions that sustain life, thereby regulating who is exposed to violence.

About the presenter: Meena Masood has recently completed her PhD at Queen Mary University of London, funded by the Queen Mary and Leverhulme Mobile People Scholarship. Her research investigates how the concept of vulnerability is operationalised by humanitarian organisations in Greece, with a focus on single men seeking protection. Meena’s work builds on and contributes to critical approaches in Border and Migration Studies, Post- and De-colonial thought, Feminism, and International Relations.