A white van rolled through the gates of a refugee camp in mainland Greece, its driver unloading a stack of pre-packaged lunches. At first sight, the scene might suggest a functioning system—residents receiving cooked lunches, with even some salad leaves peeking through the packaging, their basic needs met. But “we cannot cook here,” one refugee explained to us that day. For him, being denied the means to prepare meals overshadowed other concerns about his living conditions. State-run detention camps in Greece—where refugees may be held for months on end—impose controls over nearly every aspect of daily life. Reception camps on the mainland similarly control food, activities, and daily movements.1 By contrast, before the dismantlement of the so-called Calais Jungle at the UK-French border zone, cooking and meal sharing were integral to camp life. There, Sudanese refugees used makeshift utensils, shared traditional dishes like mullah robe and aseeda, and told stories about their families and homes while sipping chai and watching Bollywood movies.2 Despite poor living conditions, the informality of the Jungle enabled people to establish communal kitchens, build culturally organized neighborhoods, and maintain autonomous collective practices. Convivial, collective spaces have been shrinking as states redesign refugee reception, accommodation, or detention as sites of high-tech surveillance and control.
States and humanitarian organizations alike have increasingly prioritized “techno-hype” in their funding and policy decisions, often emphasizing cutting-edge technology design over the mundane yet essential infrastructures that sustain daily life for crisis-affected people.3 AI, biometrics, and blockchains capture headlines while cooking, water, hygiene, cash, transport, accommodation, and education receive less fanfare. This tech focus coincides with a broader problem in how humanitarian crises are understood. Public attention typically gravitates to the most extreme forms of deprivation and dehumanizing conditions.4 While maintaining our focus on cruel and even lethal conditions remains essential, it is also necessary to examine everyday restrictions that profoundly shape refugees’ experiences—like the simple statement: ”We cannot cook here.”
Over the past few decades, new digital infrastructures like AI-powered behavioral analysis systems, biometric gates and payments, or CCTV and drone surveillance technologies have been increasingly deployed by border agencies, police forces, and humanitarian actors to govern the lives and livelihoods of people on the move.5 As these innovations are introduced to manage refugee populations, humanitarian actors increasingly view technology through a productivist lens. New technologies—much like outsourced food delivery—are primarily analyzed through their economic production value: their measurable ability to increase humanitarian actors' efficiency, reduce costs, and even create competitive advantages in the market for scarce donor funding.6 As investment pours into these advanced tech tools, small-scale tech and life-sustaining infrastructures are easily forgotten.7 Likewise, the reproductive dimensions of these technologies—how they shape the ways individuals, households, and communities sustain life—are left ignored.
The lens of technosocial reproduction draws on the feminist concept of social reproduction to illuminate the labor required to make and maintain life. This lens avoids both techno-hype and technophobia by accounting for how social reproduction is always enabled or, conversely, impeded through technological objects, systems, and infrastructures. For example, in Jordan's highly securitized Azraq camp, to receive vital food rations, Syrian refugee women must undergo biometric iris scans at distribution centers where their transactions are recorded on a blockchain administered by United Nations agencies and private sector partners.8 This initiative is lauded by humanitarian actors as a cost-effective and empowering “digital inclusion” project. But these refugee women do not all have smartphones, and even if some do, there is no app or any other interface they can use to track their digital accounts. Facing irregular payment schedules, the women therefore cannot monitor their balances or plan household budgets. As a result, they resort to using basic but essential technologies: collecting fragile paper receipts, creating handwritten budgets, and pooling knowledge with friends who can help read and calculate their accounts. Aid organizations and technologists rarely recognize or support this crucial reproductive work—the calculating, record-keeping, and mutual aid that makes survival possible through simple, accessible tools. This oversight transforms technological innovation into an additional burden rather than relief for refugee communities.
I. The Techne of Social Reproduction
Unlike the language of “care,” social reproduction has not entered vernacular use. Yet, Premilla Nadasen has argued for using the terminology of social reproduction rather than care not only in academia but also within public discourse to “make visible the power and inequality inherent in the labor, and [look] to models of collective care and mutual aid that offer alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.”9 For Nadasen, social reproduction centers labor rights, highlighting the gendered and racial inequalities that constitute the distribution of labor. Conversely, care “shifts the conversation away from economic justice into the realm of morality and emotional investment by workers.”10
Social reproduction has a long history in feminist thought, from the 1970s Wages Against Housework campaign to Black feminist interventions about the racialized distinctions between paid and unpaid labor. Since then, the understanding of social reproduction has been expanded (and contested) to include different forms of paid and unpaid labor beyond domestic work.11 While some feminist scholars see social reproduction as the reproduction of workers and labor power, others take a more expansive understanding to encompass “the reproduction of human life more generally.”12 As Leopoldina Fortunati has put it, social reproduction includes not only material labor such as cooking, but also “immaterial dimensions such as sociality, courtship, sexuality, communication, information, education, learning, entertainment, affects and emotions.”13
If “[society] itself is being built along with objects and artifacts,” social reproduction is always also technosocial reproduction.14 In this sense, it is not just human systems of control that affect how communities maintain and reproduce themselves. Nonhuman elements, especially technologies and their design, are entangled with the reproduction of life. Yet, social reproduction has largely been absent from discussions of technology and human/nonhuman relations. And when feminist approaches have entered debates about technology, it has often been through the language of care rather than social reproduction.15
Technosocial reproduction refocuses our gaze from flashy AI or blockchain narratives to the mundane technical arrangements these systems rely on.16 It asks how analog and digital, old and new, high-tech and low-tech combine in life-sustaining work. Technosocial reproduction sheds light on how technologies prescribe some kinds of work and impede others. Consider the humble washing machine. Its introduction in the home reduced the physical burden of doing laundry for women. Yet, in combination with other household appliances, it transformed domestic labor from a communal activity into individualized, solitary work. As Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek explain, “the washing machine turned what could have been a collective industrial process into the work of a lone housewife, and the economies of scale (or government support) which could have made collective laundering a reality were never achieved.”17
What is at stake politically in technosocial reproduction is not only the reduction of working time, but how the work is organized and what effects this has on freedom and collective life. Indeed, tech is ubiquitous today in shaping our conduct and affecting our interactions, consumption, health, and relationships with authorities. Digital technologies infuse all spheres of life and dimensions of governance. The perspective of technosocial reproduction enables us to ask different questions about refugee governance and humanitarianism: How do tech innovation and design shape the boundaries between production and reproduction? How do they redistribute labor across households, communities, and societies? What kinds of paid and unpaid work do they prescribe or proscribe? How do they support or deplete people’s capacity to maintain their livelihoods over time?
II. Humanitarian Techno-Reason
Coined by anthropologist Didier Fassin, the term “humanitarian reason” describes how contemporary humanitarianism has shifted from pursuing justice to providing compassion and care, thereby reinforcing paternalistic power dynamics.18 We can also see humanitarian techno-reason as constituted by a distinction between the spheres of production and reproduction—a reified divide between “purely economic” and wider life-sustaining activities. While humanitarianism has embraced a rhetoric of care, humanitarian tech interventions often fail to account for or support the actual work of social reproduction. Social reproduction remains an absent presence in humanitarian tech projects. Take the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' (OCHA) 2024 briefing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the humanitarian sector:
AI has the potential to drive operational gains for humanitarians through enhanced efficiency in routine tasks like report drafting and data formatting.
Beyond operational efficiencies, AI enables analysis at an unprecedented scale. This has the potential to support a shift towards proactive, data-driven approaches in the humanitarian sector.19
Similarly, humanitarian agencies like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) celebrate the capacity of blockchain technology to better assist refugees by delivering aid at “zero cost,” and “within literally minutes.”20 The latest “techno-hype” fuels a productivist paradigm that frames humanitarian tech in terms of efficiency and speed for humanitarian actors. But what does it mean for aid recipients? What human costs and labor are left unaccounted for?
The intensified use of advanced digital technologies within the humanitarian sector redistributes labor between the spheres of production and reproduction, often with unacknowledged consequences. The blockchain used in Jordan's Azraq camp can only function as a viable, “efficient” aid payment system because of the reproductive labor Syrian refugee women perform on the side: collecting paper receipts, making trips to biometric distribution centers to check their accounts, calling complaint hotlines, and creating informal mutual support networks to navigate and uphold the digital system.21 These activities exact significant costs in time, stress, and physical exhaustion—costs entirely absent from aid organizations' celebratory narratives about blockchain's cost-effectiveness.
The productivist paradigm driving technological innovation in humanitarian contexts systematically obscures two critical realities. First, it conceals the essential role of “low-tech” tools such as paper records, handwritten receipts, and physical documentation that remain necessary infrastructure for supposedly frictionless digital systems like blockchain to function at all.22 Second, it masks how these digital technologies often intensify rather than alleviate the burden of social reproduction work, making essential caregiving and community maintenance activities more laborious, time-consuming, and unpredictable for the very populations they are mandated to support. This invisibility is not accidental but structural: aid organizations claim efficiency gains while transferring hidden costs onto the already overburdened shoulders of refugee communities.
From 2015–17, Berlin's Tempelhof, a disused Nazi hangar, housed up to three thousand refugees living in open-air cubicles separated by thin plasterboard dividers.23 Residents endured continuous noise and harsh, bright lighting from morning until night. Tom Scott-Smith emphasizes that what people most desperately needed there was basic, taken-for-granted tech: their own doors, personal lamps, or simply the ability to control the lights.24 Without agency over lighting, refugees could not regulate their daily rhythms or the autonomous unfolding of their personal lives. The absence of doors severely hampered privacy and peace. These blocks on the refugees’ social reproduction capacities—their ability to sleep, communicate, or procreate on their own terms—were compounded by strict restrictions on cooking: the only food allowed was mass-produced, poor quality, and culturally insensitive. People were banned from accessing the everyday technology required to make or store their own meals. As Scott-Smith recounted from his conversation with one refugee: “You have to be there in time for breakfast. You have to be there in time for lunch and supper. You have to eat what is provided or you die.”25 Humanitarian design often overlooks the essential technologies that help people sustain life and community, while implementing arrangements that undermine, dislocate, and debilitate these capacities.
III. Struggles over Technosocial Reproduction
Humanitarian governance paradoxically demands self-sufficiency from refugees while restricting the very practices that would enable it.26 Through technological mediation, social reproductive labor can become both more arduous and less autonomous, reinforcing hierarchies between those who design living arrangements and those who must accept them. While humanitarian technology design may prescribe and obstruct, people consistently repurpose, reuse, and misuse to meet their needs.27 In the restrictive conditions of Berlin’s Tempelhof, refugees engaged in small struggles of self-determination as they “[smuggled] in kettles or hot plates to make simple meals,” “stashed bread under pillows and hung blankets from the bedframes to create a refuge from the light and noise,” and “spread mats on the floor to receive friends.”28 By acknowledging these material practices not as rule-breaking but as essential acts of technosocial reproduction, humanitarian actors could work with, rather than against, the livelihood needs of crisis-affected people.
Shirin Rai advances the concept of “depletion” to analyze the human costs when social reproductive labor exceeds available resources.29 Rai defines depletion—physical exhaustion, mental distress, and economic insecurity—as a measurable process, whose quantification is crucial to both acknowledging its impact and enabling systemic redress.30 While quantifying struggles over social reproduction raises valid concerns about the commodification of human relationships, depletion offers a critical lens for rethinking humanitarian tech projects. In this sense, humanitarian design could expand its evaluative criteria, incorporating needs and metrics beyond economic production value, and monitor depletion factors associated with aid interventions, high-tech and otherwise.
More than a diagnostic tool, the perspective of technosocial reproduction invites a generative reorientation of humanitarian design towards not just measuring but actively replenishing technosocial life. This entails supporting collective struggles over how life-sustaining labor is distributed, recognized, and enabled. It also shifts the emphasis from technocratic efficiency to fostering conditions for autonomy, self-determination, and everyday freedom—from cookery and caregiving to budgeting and emotional labor.31
In the current political climate, humanitarian aid is becoming increasingly budget-constrained, privatized, and technocratic, while also facing outright bans, forced withdrawals, and threats to its very existence. This raises urgent questions about how technosocial reproduction will be valued or devalued in future humanitarian action. In this context, replenishing rather than depleting peoples’ everyday capacities to sustain life becomes essential to the very survival and legitimacy of humanitarian aid. At stake in struggles over technosocial reproduction is not just resistance to capitalist accumulation, but the possibility of humanitarian futures that serve life rather than extract from it.
“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, ➝.
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.
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.