Proyecto: Encountering compassion and stigmatised precariousness: Migrants lifeworlds, re-negotiating identities and governing humanitarian crisis in the case of Venezuelan migrants in Cali

Investigador principal: Jan Grill

Estudiante de pregrado: Jorge Edwin Velasco Narvaez

Estudiante de pregrado: Gerardina Agredo Cruz

Estudiante de pregrado: Santiago Otero Bolaã‘Os

Marco: Convocatoria interna para presentación de proyectos de investigación y creación artística en las ciencias, las artes, las humanidades, las tecnologías y la innovación 

Año: 2018

Objetivo general: The general objective of the project is to explore everyday experiences of Venezuelan migrants and their modes of ‘getting by’ in Cali, and analyse these within emerging humanitarian responses and apparatus of humanitarian ‘helping’ and ‘assistance’ and new forms of xenophobia.

Objetivos especificos: The specific objectives of the project are twofold.

1. to examine how do Venezuelan migrants re-negotiate their identities on the move through various encounters, intersecting forces and factors: navigating between acts of compassion and increased xenophobia and cultural(ised) racism. In particular, the project shall explore situational deployment and performance of certain forms of‘identity’ and of particular kinds of ‘suffering subject’. These acts of performance can range from using Venezuelan flag while performing or selling particular products on the streets or traffic lights but also performance of particular type of ‘suffering subject’ through particular body techniques in order to elicit pity or express gratefulness. It will explore how do the migrants understand and feel about these everyday actions and performances of ‘identity’ in the context of encounters with local Cali actors and institutions. At the same time, it will also ask to what extent and in which contexts do Venezuelan migrants attempt to hide their ‘Venezuelaness’ but might nevertheless be marked and stigmatised through ‘culturalising’ of their differences (for instance, their accents).

2. to study local responses to humanitarian crisis in the city of Cali by focusing predominantly on comedor comunitario but also other state and non-state institutions, which have developed various forms of assistance and modes of governing the Venezuelan migration crisis. The project will develop particular multi-scalar approach in which various representatives of different institutions dealing with the question of migration in Cali interact and encounter and, in turn, develop particular strategies of helping and assisting the migrants.

This approach will be reflected in the methodological setup of the project. The researchers will follow not only movements and strategies of Venezuelan migrants in Cali but also scale up and down alongside different institutional hierarchies and mechanisms (from interviews with state bureaucrats at the municipality level to the church volunteers or workers in the food canteens).

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