CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Serban, Irina |
|---|---|
| Title | From Crisis to Aspiration: Navigating Temporalities in Humanitarian and Educational Refugee Support Settings |
| Summary | This thesis explores how time is experienced, structured, and contested in refugee support work, focusing on the contrasting temporal logics that shape humanitarian aid and university-based educational initiatives. The central question guiding this research is: How do different refugee support models shape and reflect competing temporal regimes, and what kinds of futures are made possible or foreclosed by different models of intervention? Moreover, how do actors within these systems negotiate the tension between crisis and aspiration? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation in a refugee day center in Brussels and interviews with frontline aid workers, volunteers, and participants in the Open Learning Initiative (OLIve) program, a university-based educational initiative for displaced people, the thesis examines how temporality is lived and negotiated across institutional contexts. The thesis argues that while humanitarian support often operates within a logic of perpetual emergency and crisis, university-based initiatives like OLIve interrupt this temporal regime by fostering aspirational temporalities. Even as they remain entangled in some structural precarities, such initiatives create spaces for critical reflection, future-making, and political becoming. By tracing how time is stitched together in these two settings, this thesis speaks to the anthropology of displacement, revealing how urgency and the hope for lasting change are held together, often uneasily, by both recipients and providers of support. |
| Supervisor | Cucu, Alina-Sandra |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/serban_irina.pdf |
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