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

This paper provides new knowledge and understanding on the relationship between
volunteering, crisis and precarity. The 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 destabilise established geographies of
voluntary labour, offering analytical purchase to better understand the contemporary place
and politicisation of volunteering.