Visiting Speaker - Dr Lewis Turner

Speaker: Dr Lewis Turner

Position: Senior Lecturer in International Politics of Gender, Newcastle University

Title of lecture: The Masculinities of Humanitarianism: Governing and Gendering Syrian Refugees

Abstract: Humanitarianism is surrounded and legitimised by lofty narratives of distributing aid, providing care, and protecting the vulnerable. Yet these depictions of humanitarianism sideline and obscure how it is practiced on the ground. Humanitarianism, I argue, in its embodied, material and spatial practices, depends upon the performance of masculinities. Through an ethnographic exploration of the life and governance of Za‘tari Refugee Camp in Jordan, the largest camp for Syrian refugees in the Middle East, I expose the masculinized subject positions, logics, practices and contestations that structure and animate the social worlds of spaces such as Za‘tari. In this talk, I will introduce the humanitarian team who run Za‘tari: the Authoritarian Leader, the Objective Outsider, the Paternalist Patriarch, the Empowering Expert, the Innovative Entrepreneur and the Engaging Reformer. These masculinized positionalities variously depoliticize and disempower Syrians, dismiss and denigrate their cultural practices, and – crucially – render Syrians’ performances of masculinities suspect or illegitimate (unless humanitarians can use them to their advantage!) Following an overview of the overarching argument, we will meet the Objective Outsider in more depth, and examine how humanitarian masculinities are embedded in their insistence on objectivity, their maintenance of physical and ideological distance from their ‘beneficiaries,’ and their spatial organisation of the camp.