Becoming in the Field: Moral Complexity and Volunteer Transformation in Grassroots Humanitarianism

Kramer, Maxime Minke

4. semester

International Relations, MSc.

2025

2025-05-23

68 pages

In this Master’s thesis, I explore what humanitarian volunteering does to those participating in it, focusing on the experiences of volunteers at Northern Lights Aid, a grassroots organisation supporting displaced communities in Kavala, Greece. While the majority of my interlocutors initially described their motivations as wanting to “help others” or “do good”, their reflections revealed an emphasis on how the experience shaped them emotionally, morally and professionally. Drawing on four and a half months of field work in the form of participant observation, extended case studies and qualitative interviews, I examine how NLA’s volunteers navigate the complexities of care, responsibility and transformation. Theoretically, I draw on Victor Turner’s (1967; 1969) work on rituals and liminality, David Graeber’s (2011; 2014) exchange and everyday communism, and Liisa Malkki’s (2015) conceptualisation of humanitarians as needy. With Turner, I can frame volunteering as a rite of passage, where previous roles are suspended and new identities can emerge. Graeber’s framework of mutual care and collective responsibility helps unpack the everyday practices during volunteering that sustain NLA’s team and shape volunteers’ transformations. Malkki’s ethnography offers a lens to understand grassroots humanitarian volunteering as a site for self-escape, self-loss and self-transformation. Through the narratives of five NLA volunteers, I argue that humanitarianism is not just about giving aid, but about becoming; It is about navigating complex moral spaces, ambiguity, forming bonds, and confronting one’s positionality. These experiences complicate the binary of altruism and self-interest and suggest that volunteering in the humanitarian sector is as much about working on the self as it is about supporting others.

Humanitarianism ; Volunteering ; Liminality ; Becoming ; Northern Lights Aid

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