Accompaniment: Between idealisation, exhaustion and creativity

Many professions, organizational, and institutional settings are required to ensure the care and support of migrants at different times of their life in exile. Sometimes favoring legal-political criteria, sometimes social-health criteria, these working frameworks raise the question of the room for maneuver, the spaces of play to be built in order to support the challenge of confronting experiences of deprivation, fear, astonishment at what was experienced “there” and/or what is experienced “here,” and work that consistently exposes people to the risks of “dirty work.” The issues of recognition are essential: recognition of the subject in the category to which he or she is assigned (foreigner, asylum seeker, undocumented, unaccompanied minor, immigrant worker, etc.), but also recognition of professional practices, not only through the prism of professional rules, but also through cultural work that resists the forms of dehumanization contained in the various modes and systems of “welcoming.” The intensity of affects, psychological tensions, conflicts, and ethical suffering can lead to exhaustion and even collapse. This questions the collective resources for thinking about an ever-uncertain form of action such as the means of subverting the impediments or deviations that impact negatively on the activity.