Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Interventions by states, civil society organizations, and individual citizens to support asylum seekers are often seen and justified as acts of rescue. The rescue frame suggests that any action that improves the precarious situation of refugees is a positive achievement. Commendable as it is to take responsibility for people in need, to use a rescue logic to assess support for refugees is problematic on three levels. Politically, measures that bring positive outcomes for individual asylum seekers can at the same time enable the continuation of an unjust status quo that is to the disadvantage of many others. At the level of civil society, the rescue logic makes it easier for civil society organizations to temper the intensity of their engagement with refugees with the argument that it would be unfair to expect that this support would come at the expense of their own interests, political status, or internal cohesion. Finally, by taking responsibility for asylum seekers, citizens might simultaneously reinforce their privileged position, and thus strengthen citizenship regimes that sustain the very exclusion of refugees they seek to protest. Based on the care ethical work of Marcia Morgan, an approach to refugee care is developed that goes beyond Good Samaritanism and privileged responsibility. Through aesthetic care, democratic listening, and political imagination, citizens and refugees can jointly develop acts of contestation that not only bring tactical gains, but also actually contribute to political transformation.

Words matter, especially in times of crisis. This article analyses the complexities of political discourse on vulnerability by considering the case of the Dutch COVID-19 response. Our study finds that the framing of vulnerability as a predetermined and naturalised condition, linked to old age and pre-existing medical conditions, draws attention away from aspects of precarisation tied to economic position, social class, cultural background and living conditions. This rhetorical strategy can be understood as a practice of de-responsibilisation through which attention is rhetorically diverted from the way(s) in which political authorities are implicated in producing, exacerbating or failing to mitigate vulnerabilities.

While the COVID-19 crisis has affected people all around the world, it has not affected everyone in the same way. Besides glaring international differences, disparities in personal and situational factors have resulted in strikingly dissimilar effects even on people within the same country. Special attention is required in this regard for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) who are vulnerable to marginalization and precarization during crises as concerns over safety and public health are likely to trump consideration for inclusion and care. This article explores the lived experiences during the pandemic of people with ID living in care institutions in the Netherlands. Particular attention is paid to the challenges involved in living through periods of confinement and separation in what may be called "vulnerable spaces." Drawing from interviews with individuals with a mild ID who have been restricted in seeing family and friends through the closed access of group homes to visits from outsiders, as well as interviews with their relatives and support workers, the article considers the ways in which stakeholders have responded to these spatial policies and negotiated the meaning of living space in times of crisis.