Technosocial Reproduction and Humanitarian Reason

“Conditions in temporary accommodation facilities on the mainland” and “Detention of asylum seekers in Greece.” AIDA Country Report: Greece (2023 Update), Greek Council for Refugees, June 2024, ➝.

Shane Mitchell, “A Last Dinner in the Jungle,” Roads & Kingdoms, October 27, 2016, ➝; James Fisher and Shane Mitchell, “The Kitchens of Calais,” Medium (blog), June 27, 2017, ➝; and Myrtille Plotain, ”In the Restaurants of the Calais Jungle,” Vice, March 13, 2016, ➝.

Martina Tazzioli suggests migration research often gets caught up in “techno-hype” that frames human mobility primarily as a control and security problem. This perspective, promoted by governments, aid agencies, and tech companies, celebrates algorithmic systems for managing refugees. Focusing mainly on surveillance, privacy concerns, and resistance to these technologies inadvertently adopts a state-centered viewpoint that prioritizes institutional power dynamics over migrants' actual experiences. See Tazzioli, “Counter-Mapping the Techno-Hype in Migration Research”, Mobilities 18, no. 6 (2023): 920-935.

“Greece: Food Cutoff for Refugees,” Human Rights Watch, 16 June 2023, ➝; “Unaccompanied Children Sleep on the Floor in Shifts in Greece’s ‘Model Camps’. The EU Is Aware,” Solomon, March 31, 2025, ➝.

For example, see Chris Jones et al., “Europe’s Techno-Borders,” Statewatch and EuroMed Rights, July 2023, ➝.

Margie Cheesman, “Conjuring a Blockchain Pilot: Ignorance and Innovation in Humanitarian Aid,” Geopolitics 30, no. 3 (2025).

Stephen J. Collier et al., preface to “Little Development Devices / Humanitarian Goods” in “Little Development Devices / Humanitarian Goods,” ed. Stephen J. Collier et al., special issue, Limn 9 (2017), ➝; and Peter Redfield, "On Band-Aids and Magic Bullets,” in “Little Development Devices / Humanitarian Goods,” ed. Stephen J. Collier et al., special issue, Limn 9 (2017), ➝.

Margie Cheesman, “Blockchain for Refugees,” Data & Society: Points (blog), June 8, 2022, ➝.

Premilla Nadasen, “Rethinking care work:(Dis)affection and the politics of caring,” Feminist formations 33, no. 1 (2021): 165–88.

Nadasen, “Rethinking care work.”

Alessandra Mezzadri et al., “Feminist global political economies of work and social reproduction,” Review of International Political Economy 29, no. 6 (2021): 1783–1803.

Cinzia Arruzza and Kelly Gawel, “The politics of social reproduction. An introduction,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 22, no. 2 (2020), ➝.

Leopoldina Fortunati, “Law and the Reproduction Sphere as the Place of a Double Production of Value,” Feminists@law 12, no. 2 (2023): 4; ➝.

Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, “Do Technologies Have Trajectories” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 19.

María Puig de La Bellacasa, Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Koen Leurs, “Feminist Data Studies: Using Digital Methods for Ethical, Reflexive and Situated Socio-Cultural Research,” Feminist Review 115, no. 1 (2017), 130–54.

From electrical grids and cooling systems to fiber optic networks and standardized hardware configurations to coders and content moderators.

Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, After Work. A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (London: Verso, 2023).

Didier Fassin, Humanitarian reason: A moral history of the present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Briefing Note on Artificial Intelligence and the Humanitarian Sector, OCHA, 17 April 2024, ➝.

Wahid Pessarlay, “UN Humanitarian Agency Mulls Blockchain Solution in Assisting Refugees,” CoinGeek, January 10, 2024, ➝.

Cheesman “Blockchain for Refugees”; and Cheesman, “Poor Money? Refugees On Blockchain”, New Media & Society (forthcoming).

See also Lucrezia Canzutti and Claudia Aradau, “Collecting, assembling, ordering: Border politics and the invisible data work of asylum” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 42, no. 7 (2024): 1242–59.

Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, built by the Nazis in the 1930s, was used to house refugees starting in October 2015, peaking at around 3,000 residents in 2016 before closing to new arrivals in late 2017. It was reopened in December 2022 with a container facility that could accommodate up to 840 people, and refugees are still living there at the time of writing. See: "Tempelhof Refugee Shelter,” Camps 2 Cities Project, ➝; Grey Hutton, “Inside the Decommissioned Berlin Airport Housing 1,300 Refugees,” Vice, May 23, 2016, ➝; and "Refugee accommodation with 840 places opens in Tempelhof,” State of Berlin, ➝.

Tom Scott-Smith, Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2024).

Scott-Smith, Fragments of Home.

Martina Tazzioli, “Refugees’ (In)dependency Conundrum: Obstructed Social Reproduction Activities and Unpaid Labour in Refugee Camps,” Antipode 56, nno. 4 (2024): 1483–1503. More recently, in Greece, the access of humanitarian actors to refugee camps has become increasingly restricted.

Fleur Johns, #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Scott-Smith, Fragments of Home, 109.

Shirin Rai, Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring (Oxford University Press, 2024).

For instance, time-use surveys, health indicators, and well-being assessments can be used to document the toll of social reproduction. Rai suggests quantification is a political act making hidden costs visible in policy and economic debates, allowing activists and policymakers to argue for compensation, support services, or structural change (like public childcare, paid leave, or reduced working hours).

On autonomy, see Scott-Smith, Fragments of Home.