View article

What does it mean to care in the context of extreme adversity, such as the crisis of hospitality that migrants have encountered in Europe in the past decade? Drawing on a geographies-of-care framework, this chapter follows the case study of a humanitarian volunteer in the unofficial refugee camp in Calais, France. 1 Foregrounding the complexities of care provides a useful entry point to understanding the interactions between formal contexts in which care occurs and informal practices across time and space, including in conditions saturated with precarity and power. However, the assumed figure of the adult as carer in this theoretical approach is challenged by the complexities of lives on the move and the contested nature of childhood.

The wider backdrop to this case study is the movement of more than one million asylum seekers entering Europe in 2015, some of whom made their way to the refugee camp in …