Backstage Labour on the Frontlines: A Feminist Analysis of Technology and the Everyday Repair Work of Humanitarian Aid in Lebanon

Abstract

Enduring challenges of limited resourcing, pressure resulting from disasters, and competition often stifle emergency response. It is crucial to understand the labour that is dedicated to carrying out humanitarian efforts on the ground - efforts that sustain aid delivery and enable it to persist despite such challenges. Although there is a growing body of scholarship on what some scholars have referred to as "everyday humanitarianism" (e.g., Hilhorst, 2013), there are gaps in knowledge about the mundane forms of work necessary for adapting to constraints. This thesis illuminates and analyses the everyday labour required to manage breakdowns in disaster response by examining the implementation of Lebanon's digitised cash assistance for refugees and emergency response to the Beirut Port explosion of 2020. In particular, I examine "repair work" in practice - the on-the-ground strategies required to maintain functionality in light of collapse (Jackson, 2014).

This study is informed by data collected during a three-year multi-sited ethnography, which entailed interviews, document analysis, and participant observation with humanitarian staff, residents, and policymakers. As a feminist analysis, it focuses on how the relationship between responsive strategies, power, and inequality influence crisis interventions, extending other analyses that have looked at how labour takes shape outside of traditional workspaces. By examining the technosocial constitution of repair work, this research illuminates forms of labour that not only support these systems but also transform their configurations. Despite being seemingly behind the scenes, repair work is some of the most pervasive and essential work in the humanitarian sector. A four-part analysis shows different dimensions of repair work: first, it involves contestation and under-recognised contributions, which reflects shifts in labour related to digitising humanitarian infrastructures; second, repair work that aims to include local responders in partnership structures paradoxically contributes to their invisibilisation; third, repair work that seeks to care for those suffering from the financial crisis often leads to the implementation of stop-gap responses that can prolong suffering; and fourth, repair work mitigating strains on aid delivery can become captured by dominant regulatory modes that manage humanitarian labour.

In responding to material conditions and negotiating splintered humanitarian systems, these forms of repair work reveal a tension: they often cement divisions between different humanitarian stakeholders. This labour can perpetuate fractures in working relationships, hierarchies of value related to who does what kinds of labour, cooperative dynamics between different responders, and processes aimed at providing basic assistance to vulnerable civilians.

Humanitarian repair work reflects longstanding gendered and feminist critiques of labour. Repair work in the Lebanese context is generative of uncompensated reproductive labour, care work, and emotional management labour. As such, repair work emerges in and responds to variegated formations of inequality that cross-cut concerns of precarity, disenfranchisement, and coercion experienced by groups who are supposed to benefit from humanitarianism. This thesis sheds light on both the forms and consequences of repair work, acknowledging it has received little attention in popular accounts of disaster response. Findings contribute to and complicate dominant understandings of aid reform, especially those dependent on technological innovation and systems of regulation. Show more