Humanitarianism as a Regime of Love
Asylum-seekers’ Experiences in Hong Kong

This talk examines the affective politics in asylum-seekers’ efforts to recuperate the “human” in humanitarianism. Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis draws on long-term asylum-seekers' experiences in different post-crisis humanitarian organisations in Hong Kong. Locating NGOs that primarily serve asylum-seekers and refugees in the entangled histories of colonialism and humanitarianism in Hong Kong, I first give context to understanding the expatriate-dominated NGO scene for refugees in the 2000s. Then I discuss "humanitarian love" as an analytical framework of affective regimes and practices. With reference to asylum-seekers’ experiences in two different humanitarian spaces: a Christian fellowship that started serving African asylum-seekers since the 2000s, and then a new NGO founded in the mid-2010s, I show that the affective regimes of care is not just what Lisa Stevenson called a “regime of life”, but also what I consider “a regime of love.” I conclude by considering the “politics of love” that arise from the incommensurability of refugees as humanitarian subjects and as intimate subjects.

Sealing Cheng is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research is concerned with issues of gender, sexuality, and migration. Her book, On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (University of Pennsylvania Press 2010) received the Distinguished Book Award of the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association in 2012. In 2012, she started research on asylum-seekers and refugees, with specific focus on their intimate relationships. She co-founded in 2016 the band Talents Displaced, made up of asylum-seekers, refugees, and ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. Her articles have appeared in Feminist Theory, Feminist Review, Feminist Studies, Current Anthropology, Journal of Migration Studies, etc. She is currently working on a manuscript on intimacy and refugees tentatively titled Love on the Borders.