• Humanitarianism
• Politics of care
• Critical migration studies
• Anthropology of labour

Politics of humanitarian care: aid, displacement and social reproduction in Croatia (REHUM)

The idea behind the REHUM project is that institutionalized care practices are being replaced by emergency aid. This process, understood as the humanitarization of care, will be approached through participative ethnography in two humanitarian settings: internal post-earthquake displacement and contemporary migration in the Balkan borderlands, particularly Croatia. The project will explore whether the expansion of humanitarian initiatives in these two contexts in Croatia highlights the same problem of erosion of institutionalized care while shedding light on the ambivalent transformations occurring within grassroots collectives in their attempts to replace such systems. By relying on feminist research of social reproduction, particularly its relationship to humanitarianism, REHUM aims to expand the critique of care. Starting from the assumption that care—understood as an essential part of life and a practice crucial for human development—is structurally devalued and externalized to the private sphere and informal aid initiatives, REHUM seeks to identify how humanitarianism in Croatia supports that process while situating limited state responses and their replacement with temporary humanitarian solutions within a broader political framework.

Jakob-Welder-Weg 20
55128 Mainz
Philosophicum II (Neubau), 2. OG
Raum 02.309

E-Mail: rpozniak@uni-mainz.de

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WiSe 2025/26