Outsourced Compassion: The Relational Geographies of Volunteered Care
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2025-08-20
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en
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Health, often positioned as a universal right and a sovereign duty, becomes revealing when it is outsourced, fragmented, or rendered inaccessible. In the case of asylum seekers in Ireland (International Protection Applicants), access to healthcare is increasingly mediated through the voluntary sector. This withdrawal of state from responsibility is not incidental, but reflective of a broader governmental precarisation logic that normalises societal insecurity and offloads care onto voluntary actors. Through an ethnographic exploration of the case study organisation, HarbourCare, this study adopts a relational approach in examining how care is practiced and negotiated across multiple scales, from client interactions, state and shadow state relations, and external connections with physical space. Grounded in the compassionate but contingent everyday practices of care, this thesis shows how these practices are shaped by resources, ties, informal networks, and information flows. Ultimately, this thesis argues that these voluntary provisions of care are deeply relational, shaped by, and entangled within the state’s governance of precarity through deliberate outsourcing of care for particular groups. Situating care in these broader landscapes reveals how voluntary care simultaneously mitigates and sustains these systems of precarisation.
Keywords – care, relational geography, voluntary sector, migrant health
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen