Anthropology of Good: Exploring Volunteerism in the 2015 European Refugee Crisis

RSC Public Seminar Series, Hilary Term 2026

Series convened by Professor Tom Scott-Smith and Professor Catherine Briddick

About this talk

This presentation explores the impulses which led so many to volunteer their time and energy to welcome and make Syrians feel ‘at home’ upon arrival in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Rather than focus on the suffering of Syrians seeking safety (Chatty, 2018: Rabo et al, 2021: Beck, 2021; Cantat, 2021), it turns to interrogate the motivations which drove so many citizens and residents, alike, to step forward and be generous to those in need (Chatty, 2017). These two study sites offered an opportunity to study volunteering to come to the aid of Syrians and other asylum seekers in both a relatively hostile policy and media environment  and a sympathetic one. Framing the study from primarily an anthropological perspective, rather than from within the disciplines of psychology, religious studies,  or economics provides an opportunity to explore notions of  social duty, of doing the right thing, and of humanity.

About the speaker

Dawn Chatty, is Emeritus Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. She is also Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests include coping strategies and resilience of refugee youth; tribes and tribalism; nomadic pastoralism and conservation; gender and development; health, illness, and culture. She has worked with nomadic pastoral groups in Lebanon and Syria since the mid-1970s and extended her research to Oman in 1979. She has continued to be engaged with these communities and advocate for their rights to resist forced settlement. Since 1998 she has worked with refugee youth in situations of prolonged armed conflict in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza, Algeria ( with Sahrawi refugees) and Iran ( Afghan Hazaras). 

She has edited numerous books including: Deterritorialized Youth:  Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the Middle East, Berghahn Books, 2010; Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa: Facing the 21st Century, Leiden, Brill, 2006; Children of Palestine: Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East, Berghahn Books, 2005; and Conservation and Mobile Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development Berghahn Press, 2002.  She is the author of Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East Cambridge University Press, 2010, From Camel to Truck, White Horse Press, 2013, and Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State, Hurst Publishers, 2018.

The seminar will be followed by drinks in the Hall.

Registration not required.

All enquiries should be directed to rsc-outreach@qeh.ox.ac.uk