Becoming Rasuwa Relief: Practices of Multiple Engagement in Post-Earthquake Nepal

Abstract

In this article, we reflect on the multiple nature of our engagements in the wake of the 7.8m earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25th 2015. Specifically, we trace the events, experiences, decisions, positions, and processes that constituted our work with a post-earthquake volunteer initiative we helped to form, called Rasuwa Relief. Using the concept of multiplicity (cf. Mol 2002), we consider the uncertain process by which Rasuwa Relief began to cohere, as a collective of diverse efforts, interventions, projects, and commitments, and how Rasuwa Relief was continually and multiply enacted through practices of engagement. As a collaborative effort that coordinated and consolidated many of our post-earthquake interventions over a period of two years, Rasuwa Relief was always in a state of becoming. This process of becoming, we suggest, indexed and informed the multiple ways that we participated and intervened in the aftermath of the earthquake—as accidental humanitarians or ‘relief workers’, as early-career scholars, and as people attempting to balance diverse personal, academic, and ethical commitments within and beyond Nepal. Based on a reflexive analysis of these multiple engagements, we also present an embedded critique of ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin 2012), inclusive of our own decisions and actions, alongside a selfcritical analysis of the affective factors that shaped our own ‘need to help’ (Malkki 2015).