“I Call It My Backpack Office”: Organizational Materiality of Refugee-Led Grassroots Organizations Vis-a-Vis Refugee/-Serving Professionalized Agencies

Recent scholarship interrogates grassroots refugee-led organizations (RLOs) as institutions in multilevel governance vis-a-vis professionalized refugee/migrant-serving organizations. Whereas the latter, as street-level bureaucracies, are constrained by policies, funding and the political sphere, refugee-led organizations enact resistances and affordances at the most local levels of governance. This paper contributes to this line of scholarship by drawing from a new materialist lens to hone in on the relevance of materiality, space, infrastructure and relationality in analyses of refugees’ organizational life. Analysis draws upon multiple sources of data: surveys, focus groups and interviews with refugee leaders in the United States; and survey and interviews with migrant workers and practitioners in Canada. This paper argues that organizations’ occupying of physical space, use of digital tools and deployment of privatized resources are bound to their visibility as an institution and to the actuality of their practices. Borrowed office space, WhatsApp group chats, a grocery store, and a refugee’s ‘backpack office’, for instance, emerge as salient in examining the settlement and integration practices of RLOs. The material is examined not merely with tangible qualities, but also with symbolic capacities. That is, the physical spaces, digital tools and material resources of RLOs yield meaning—affordances and limitations—that shape their work. The nimble, small, improvising RLO is contrasted with the stable, established social service agency. In their grassroots endeavors, the symbolic legitimacy and the materiality of refugee-led organizations go hand-in-hand and are mutually constitutive.