ABSTRACT
As a motivation for social justice-oriented action, compassion has been criticised for presupposing an unequal power relationship between a privileged giver of compassion and a disadvantaged subject. Critics argue that ‘compassionate’ relationships reinforce and reproduce inequalities; they also imply that care givers derive emotional gratification from their privileged roles. In making these arguments, scholars in this tradition charge volunteers with a failure of reflexivity. This chapter interrogates these ideas through an empirical study of volunteer reflexivity in asylum seeker friendship programmes. It draws on in-depth interviews with 30 volunteers who support asylum seekers in Australia’s onshore immigration detention facilities, and foregrounds the role of reflexivity in this work. This chapter provides evidence (a) that reflexively managed moral emotions concerning Australia’s ‘politics of fear’ inspire volunteers to begin visiting detention; (b) that reflexively managed guilt regarding the structural injustices that they encounter in detention inform their volunteer relationships; and (c) that mutual exercises in emotion work – where asylum seekers and volunteers work together to create small pockets of normality – are common in these affective institutional settings. In presenting these findings, this chapter contests the previously described understanding of care-based volunteer work. It also provides evidence of the role of reflexivity in late modernity.
