Umeå centrum för genusstudier
Att hjälpa andra
Gåvans, rättvisans och medkänslans aporier i frivilligarbete
Hanna Bäckström
Akademisk avhandling
som med vederbörligt tillstånd av Rektor vid Umeå universitet för avläggande av filosofie doktorsexamen framläggs till offentligt försvar i Hörsal E, Humanisthuset,
fredagen den 29 maj, kl. 13.15.
Avhandlingen kommer att försvaras på svenska.
Fakultetsopponent: Docent, Lisa Folkmarson Käll,
Institutionen för etnologi, religionshistoria och genusvetenskap, Stockholms universitet, Stockholm.
Organization Document type Date of publication
Umeå University Doctoral thesis 8 May 2020
Umeå Centre for Gender Studies
Author
Hanna Bäckström
Title
Helping others – the aporias of gift giving, justice and compassion in voluntary work
Abstract
The thesis addresses the issue of social work in Swedish civil society, focusing on the ambition and practice of helping others as an existential as well as a social, political and cultural phenomenon. The aim is to study the ambiguities and aporetic conflicts that imbue helping activities and the desire to help others, using ethnographic as well as philosophical method. An interview study comprising of 12 volunteers and activists, all working with begging EU-citizens in Sweden, was carried out between 2015 and 2016. The interviews aimed to gather context specific experiences of helping others from a vulnerable group, especially concerning questions of power asymmetry and moral and political dilemmas.
Subsequently, a reading of the participants’ narratives informed by Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction was performed. Following Derrida’s understanding of deconstruction as a bipartite process, focusing on genealogy and representation as well as the logico-formal paradoxes, aporias or ‘undecidables’, that characterise certain phenomena, two strands of research questions guided the analysis: Firstly, how do the participants understand and create meaning regarding their helping activities? And secondly, what seemingly impossible paradoxes, aporias, emerge in the constituting ideas and practices of helping, as they are expressed in the participants’ narratives?
Resulting from this reading and a parallel literature study, three main areas of conflict were identified: altruistic gift-giving vs. reciprocity and exchange, objective and structural justice vs. personal relations and exceptions, and lastly, the meaning of empathy as well as the difficulty of representing the suffering of others. The main theoretical sources are Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Hélène Cixous and Jessica Benjamin, whose writings on economy, gifts, responsibility, desire and intersubjectivity respectively, are employed to understand and theoretically develop the participants experiences.
Connecting the difficulty of doing a good deed to feminist ethical elaborations on care and justice, I conclusively argue for a deconstructive ethics of care, that takes the aporetic character of helping others into account, while not relinquishing the responsibility towards the other and the possibility of solidarity.
Keywords
civil society, critical social work, empathy, ethics of care, feminist ethics, gifts, gift-giving, moral perception, poststructuralist ethics, solidarity, street-begging, voluntary social work
Language ISBN Number of pages
Swedish Print: 978-91-7327-273-5 381 PDF: 978-91-7879-004-3
