How Humanitarian Relief ‘Works’: International Aid Organizations and Local Labor in Crisis Contexts

Patricia Ward, Sociology, Technische Universität Dresden
Labor Relations, Local-Global Relations, Racism, Nationalism and Ethnic Relations, Sociology, Sociology of Culture, Work
Keywords - Aid and Development, Labour, Work, Migration/Mobility

Patricia Ward is a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Integration Studies at the Technische Universität Dresden. Her research interests are in the areas of transnational labor, humanitarian aid and development, and migration/mobility. Patricia was previously with the Department of Ethics, Law and Politics at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and obtained her doctorate from Boston University in Fall 2020. Her dissertation, “How Humanitarian Relief ‘Works’: International Aid Organizations and Local Labor in Crisis Contexts” examined the reorganization of labor relations amidst a growing number of protracted displacement crises worldwide. She specifically focused on how ‘localization’ policies affected national aid workers employed in the sector in Jordan, a major global aid hub. How human displacement affects and organizes other aspects of the aid chain informs the scope of her upcoming project on humanitarian logistics and the role of UN humanitarian hubs.