Narratives of “Welcome Culture”: The Cultural Politics of Voluntary Aid for Refugees

Abstract

Drawing on an ethnographic and discourse-analytic study, this article examines the meaning and function of narrative in the civic engagement of volunteers who provided humanitarian aid to refugees during the migratory movements of 2015. I argue that a group of self-organized volunteers in a German town used diffferent kinds of narrative during their engagement to advance their own views on the migratory movements and on voluntary work with refugees. A collective narrative in terms of a cognitive structure evolved during the event that shaped the relationship between the volunteers and authorities.