Reconceptualising volunteering, crisis and precarity: the experiences of refugee youth in Uganda during COVID-19

This paper provides new knowledge on, and reconceptualises our understanding of, the relationship between volunteering, crisis and precarity. This paper critically examines how COVID-19’s impact on volunteering has been varied and spatially differentiated, drawing on the example of young refugee volunteers in Uganda. Our mixed methods data provides an important counterpoint to dominant global narratives around volunteering’s upsurge during COVID-19. In Uganda, this crisis exacerbated inequalities in accessing volunteering opportunities and severely impacted livelihoods, captured in our extensive quantitative and qualitative fieldwork. The paper reveals important new evidence on the scale of hidden yet significant economies of volunteering operating for vulnerable young people in the global South and the importance of a geographical lens in understanding these economies. We show how COVID-19 starkly exposed the precarity inherent in refugee youth volunteering and related volunteering economies, contributing a step change in current understandings of youth volunteering and employment in geography and the social sciences. We make a wider call for an approach attentive to the multiple spatial, social and economic impacts of volunteering. Overall, the paper pushes forward debates on the important need to destabilize established geographies of voluntary labour, offering analytical purchase to better understand the contemporary place and politicization of volunteering.