Compassionate Refusal and the Refugee Crisis

By Ala Sirriyeh (Sociology, Keele) and Simon Goodman (Centre for Research in Psychology, Behaviour and Achievement, University of Coventry)

 

In the summer of 2015 the world’s attention was focused on Europe’s borders as thousands of people seeking refuge arrived or perished on route. The now iconic and tragic picture of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying face down and still on a Turkish beach dominated news and social media coverage in September 2015. This spectacle of a child’s death led to a shift in the tone of media, political and public discourse on the ‘refugee crisis’ which, for a time, became noticeably more compassionate.

 

We have argued elsewhere that rather than being presented as one continuing event the movement of people into Europe has been configured as a number of different crises. Over the summer, as the events became framed as a ‘(European) refugee crisis’, debates ensued about how Europe could best respond to this crisis and whether indeed part of the crisis was the nature of the response itself. The perceived absence of compassion in driving the actions of European governments has led many to argue that there is a crisis in the European heart and subsequently the moral and political values that supposedly define this region and its peoples- a #CompassionCrisis. In connection with this it has also been perceived as a crisis in the project of the European Union which originated in the aftermath of that earlier genocide and mass displacement of peoples during the Second World War, with some making parallels with the treatment of the victims of the Holocaust. Engaging with the idea of a crisis of compassion, in June 2015 art activists from the Centre for Political Beauty in Berlin announced plans to exhume the bodies of some of those people who had died trying to reach Europe. They would exhume them from inhumane graves (or storage) where they lay at Europe’s external borders and rebury them with dignity in Berlin, at the heart of Europe.  Using the hashtag #DieTotenKommen (The Dead Will Come), the group claimed that this intervention aimed ‘to tear down the walls surrounding Europe’s sense of compassion’.

 

Research on emotion and immigration, especially on attitudes to immigration and policy-making, have primarily focussed on hostile emotions – disgust, fear, hate and so on (Ahmed 2004, Tyler 2013). There is a more limited critical engagement with ‘humanising emotions’ (Berlant 2004) (including compassion) beyond simply presenting these as a viable and necessary remedy to the exclusion and harm caused by hostility.

 

As Nussbaum (1996, p.28) states, compassion can be regarded as a basic social emotion bridging the individual and the community through tying together the interests of others with our ‘own personal goods’. It is refreshing to see a broader engagement with emotion in the attention being given in public debates to the matter of compassion in the current refugee crisis. Decision-making, whether considered ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, draws on both intellectual and emotional reason (Burkitt 2014). Emotions move people and are the outcomes of being moved and emotional reason leads to certain kinds of decisions being made. Compassion perhaps more so than other emotions makes a clear link between the heart and the head; sentiment and action. However, questions remains as to what shape compassionate responses should take and what is the nature of justice that is envisioned as an outcome of such actions? So while some respond in ways that attempt to alleviate suffering in the name of compassion, problematic policies can also be justified on compassionate grounds. There are several challenges that policy and practice informed by compassion potentially present.

Compassion in the current refugee crisis wavers between two different meanings of the term that imply very different social relationships and outcomes. Between the fourteenth century and the seventeenth century the term ‘compassion’ had two meanings. The first derived from the Latin word com meaning ‘together’ and patri meaning ‘fellow feeling’ was used to describe a sense of ‘suffering together with one another’ (Garber 2004, p. 20). The second way in which the term compassion was used was to describe compassion felt at a distance rather than between equals – between the spectator and the sufferer. It was ‘shown towards a person in distress by one who is free from it, who is, in this respect, his superior’ (ibid). Garber (2004) writes that the first meaning of the term fell out of use quickly while the second meaning is the one we now most commonly ascribe to compassion. In this second meaning the sufferers must perform a convincing suffering role and are reliant on the compassion shown by others.  A genuine refugee deserving of our compassion is a refugee not a migrant, a child not a single young man, a Syrian rather than an Afghan. This distance between the spectator and the sufferer can also lead to a problematic disentanglement of the interests of the different actors involved – or the interests of others and our own personal goods (see Nussbaum above on compassion). As part of a wider turn to ‘humanitarian government’ (Fassin 2012) compassionate policies such as Cameron’s Syrian Vulnerable Person Relocation Scheme are used to demonstrate and reinforce the rhetoric of a benevolent UK state with a proud history of welcoming refugees  yet do little to address the real scale or causes of the crisis.

 

This links to a further challenge with the notion of compassion which is with the way in which cause, outcome and response are interlinked and relate to a sense of responsibility and obligation. Those who give compassion are free of blame or obligation. Compassion is a gift rather than an obligation. The right to seek asylum as set out in the 1951 UN Convention is just that: a right. There is a risk that a language of compassion when used to demonstrate or ask for benevolence from the state shifts focus away from legitimate demands for the recognition of rights and demands for justice by those who are agentic human beings rather than passive victims at the mercy of a benevolent state. The notion of compassion as a gift from those who are blameless also severs any critical engagement with Europe’s colonial history and relationships with other parts of the world.

On the part of governments, a discourse of compassion has not only been used to showcase benevolence but has also been used to justify repression – see for example attempts to limit sea rescue missions to dissuade people from making treacherous see journeys to seek refuge in Europe – which amounts to the terrible logic of saving by drowning.

Consumption attitudes and practices among young people in Belgium

Dr Lydia Martens

I was at the University of Antwerp earlier this month, where I had been invited to be a member of the academic jury, at the public defence of the PhD thesis of Jeremi van Gorp. The subject of the thesis was consumption, identity and young people (Its Dutch title is: Consumptie als Bouwsteen en Communicator van Identiteit bij Tieners), and Dr van Gorp had conducted a quantitative study to find out what role consumption plays in the social lives and personal identities of young people aged 12 to 18 (those of secondary school age). The study investigated consumption attitudes and practices, and examined money, expenditure on goods, shopping, gift giving and saving, as well as materialism, happiness derived from consumption, and influences of the peer group.

The original findings from the work were reached from a data set of a staggering 3200 cases - all the hard craft of one single researcher visiting secondary schools across the Flemish counties. Reading the study, one thing that was very apparent is how challenging it is to translate sociological theories and concepts into measurable entities, also known in ‘the trade’ as operationalisation. In this study, the researcher had thought hard about how to measure ‘identity’, and was fully aware of, and spoke at length about, the limitations of the choices he had made. In making these choices, he had in fact reached beyond sociology, drawing on influences from psychology and marketing & consumer behaviour. He had thus chosen to include some pre-existing scales in his questionnaire that examine the sense of self (which he conceptualised as elements of a personal identity) and the sense of one’s standing and connectedness in the peer group (which he conceptualised as elements of a social identity). This is something sociologists do not often do when designing questionnaires, at least, not in UK sociology! One of the assumptions made in the thesis was that the peer group is a salient part of the social identity of young people, and the concern in these social science disciplines in, for instance, materialism, was reflected in the focus of the thesis.

The analysis proceeded from bivariate analysis through to regression analysis, and suggests that there are some interesting variations in what, how and why young people consume. Interesting gender patterns in the data included, and this may not come as a surprise, that the young women in the study on average had access to less money than the young men. Belgium parents clearly believe that their daughters can do with less pocket money than their sons. I wonder whether we might find a similar pattern in the UK, were we to conduct a similar survey here? Young women also spent more on clothes and beauty products than young men, they bought more presents, and they saved less. There were also age variations, which suggested that young people do grow into the consumer culture as they get older, and start spending money on ‘necessities’, like transport.

Another set of findings related differences in relation to education pathways. The Belgium education system has different streams for young people doing ‘A-level’ education that prepares them for higher education, and those who do vocational training routes. Dr van Gorp, who has worked in secondary schools for some years, described the youth culture in the vocational education sector as ‘harder’ than elsewhere, and here, young people had more money and they also used consumption more as a means for building and maintaining social peer relationships and standing. Interestingly, the same was the case for young people from migrant backgrounds! Van Gorp also concluded that those who are popular amongst their peers have more money, and spend more money, suggesting that popularity is costly.

Given the size of the sample, and the wealth of insights created, I would have liked to see Dr van Gorp take his analysis a little further. As a researcher who is well versed in social science research on children and consumer culture, I believe it would be very interesting to think further about what the consumption attitudes and practices of young people can tell us about what it is that makes young people, as a cohort and ‘location’ in the life course, stand out from other people, and what that tells us about theories of consumption, social connectedness and identity. In addition, rather than assuming that the peer group is the only, or most salient, aspect of young persons’ social identity, I would have liked to see further discussion on how different elements of social identity relate to each other. Whilst Dr van Gorp explained how, at the pilot stage of the study, it had become apparent that a large proportion of young persons do not know about their parents educational qualifications and employment – typical indicators of class location, some insight into social influences and background could be read through the study’s various socio-demographic variables, where educational streaming could be said to say something about class, and gender difference about gender as a social and cultural phenomenon. Even so, the study’s achievements should not be underestimated and the database is a solid resource with the potential to make a good contribution to the fields of young people and consumption in the future.

The thesis was promoted by Dimitri Mortelmans, Professor of Sociology at Antwerp University, who was the lead supervisor of the research. The other members of the jury were Professor Michel Walrave, Dr Walter Weyns, and Dr Karolien Poels, all from the University of Antwerp and working in the Departments of Sociology and Communication Studies, and Dr Christine Delhaye, who works in the Department of Arts, Religion and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. The defence started with a presentation by the candidate on his work, followed by discussion and questions from the jury. After the jury’s deliberation, the candidate was passed, and the Promotor concluded the event with a personal and warm afterword. For me, the public defence offered insight into how universities in different countries vary in the way they promote the people they train to take up roles in the Higher Education sector. I was witness to an eloquent, and also heartfelt, tribute to the tribulations of this project, and the resilience of the researcher. 

Celebrating the Winter Graduation Ceremonies

Nicola Edwards and Dr Rachel Cason

By Dr Emma Head

Keele's Winter Graduation Ceremonies took place on Thursday. This was a proud day for the Sociology group as a number of students who started their Keele studies as undergraduates with us graduated with postgraduate degrees. Two of these graduates are pictured here. Congratulations to Dr Rachel Cason who was awarded a PhD in Sociology and to Nicola Edwards who was awarded a MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice. Rachel and Nicola are both past winners of the Neil and Gina Smith Student of the Year prize, which is awarded to one Keele student each year in recognition of their contribution to the life of Keele and the wider community. Rachel was student of the year in 2008, Nicola was awarded this title in 2014. We wish Rachel and Nicola well for the future.  

A visit from Dr Yaroslav Nikiforov

In December the Sociology group hosted a visit from a Russian scholar, Dr Yaroslav Nikiforov, from Saratov State University. He is a social theorist who researches social change in Russian society.

Yaroslav Nikiforov's paper on Russian sociology

Yaroslav used his time at Keele to become more familiar with British sociology and he observed some of our undergraduate teaching. At the end of his visit Yaroslav presented a paper which introduced us to the history of Russian sociology and explored some of the key issues facing contemporary Russian society. In the discussion that followed we compared Russian and British sociology and talked about the common challenges facing our discipline today.