Abstract
AbstractDrawing on qualitative interviews conducted in 2017 with 29 volunteers in the US state of Oregon, in this article, we critically examine volunteers’ motivations to aid migrants and refugees in an overtly hostile political period. Our central aim is understanding what sustains local volunteer actions to offer welcome to refugees when state policies and practices are exclusionary and unwelcoming. Considering these community-based efforts as a form of volunteer humanitarianism, we discuss three central motivations for these efforts: first, personal and family histories connect volunteers in intimate ways to migrant and refugee struggles; second, volunteers are therefore affectively motivated to help, drawing on powerful emotions to sustain their efforts; and third, these local volunteer efforts strive to reimagine US citizenship and national belonging in more inclusionary ways.
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