Lesson 4.3: Care & Survival in Exile
This topic explores aspects of survival and political resistance that are often intangible—emotional support, informal care, and everyday acts of solidarity—but we will anchor these in concrete examples to try and grasp them. We learn how care, friendship, and solidarity networks sustain life in exile and become the infrastructure of political agency. In contexts where institutions fail, these acts of mutual support are not simply emotional responses - they are political practices that make survival possible.
2. Care as Political Practice
Across the RESIST Transnational Report, participants describe how cooperation — sharing food, translation, housing, legal help, emotional support, even free therapy — fills gaps left by state institutions. These informal networks form the scaffolding of life in exile.
bell hooks (2000) reminds us that communities of care emerge from mutual responsibility, not institutional power. In practice, this can include sharing housing, helping with legal forms, or providing emotional support. Care, in this sense, becomes a political practice: a response to structural neglect.
One activist in Athens described it clearly:
There is no vulnerability without resistance, because otherwise it’s unlivable. (Greece Report, p. 20)
Small acts — helping with an asylum interview, sharing a laptop, accompanying someone to an appointment — are political because they reclaim dignity within systems that produce dependency.
These practices exemplify what James Scott (1990) calls the “hidden transcript” of resistance: unannounced, everyday actions that challenge domination.
Everyday acts of agency
Exile often strips people of professional identity. Reclaiming agency begins with small acts of continuity.
Melek, a feminist scholar from Turkey, described how “despite having more international publications, projects, and achievements compared to many German academics, feminist academic Melek’s mentor at the university tried to dissuade her from applying for the grants she wanted, claiming that she couldn't compete with German academics.
Arat, a trans activist, who wanted to continue her interrupted academic career, restarted her university studies in exile. She explained how, during a career counselling session, the counsellor did not ask about her qualifications and recommended that she become a ticket inspector on trains. She wants to leave academia and work as a nurse because, considering the multiple marginalisations she has experienced as a trans woman refugee, including ageism and the language barrier, she does not have the energy to fight for her right to exist in academia. She noted that if she were a cis woman, she would have stayed in academia. (Exile Report, p. 11)
Belarusian queer feminists, also shared how they sustain their movements digitally – documenting repression, supporting political prisoners, and keeping memory alive. Similarly, Kurdish and Turkish queer activists use podcasts and online journals to link local struggles to transnational conversations.
| These practices align with Sara Ahmed’s argument (2017) that ‘living as a feminist’ is itself a form of theory – an ongoing act of making meaning against institutional power. |
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Care, in exile, is also intellectual work. Feminist epistemologies emphasise that knowledge is socially situated and shaped by power, position, and struggle. From this perspective, people living through displacement, marginalisation, and political repression do not merely endure injustice. They produce critical knowledge about how institutions fail, how violence operates, and how survival is organised in practice. By documenting experiences of exile, trauma, and resistance, displaced activists and journalists create archives of lived knowledge that challenge dominant narratives of victimhood and foreground agency, creativity, and political insight. |