Activists as Political Translators? Addressing Inequality and Positional Misunderstandings in Refugee Solidarity Coalitions

This chapter provides an ethnography of German and Danish refugee solidarity activism focusing on the politics of intersectional gendered inclusion and exclusion in a variety of organizations including grassroots feminist and LGBTQ groups. I first address the challenges of structural inequalities and status differences in initiatives and solidarity encounters for refugees taking place in two different national contexts and in an increasingly hostile external environment. I then discuss how a lack of intersectional awareness in heterogeneous coalitions may foster positional misunderstandings; that is, situations in which issues of gender and sexuality are represented along dividing lines of “cultural differences” while structural inequalities are overlooked. As a potential response to conflict and demobilization caused by intersectional positional misunderstandings, the chapter presents the collective practices of political translation which help to foster more inclusive cooperation in refugee solidarity coalitions involving different linguistic and civic status groups. Political translation, distinct from linguistic translation, is a set of disruptive and communicative practices developed by queer and feminist activists, migrants, minority organizers and global justice activists in Europe and the US in order to work together more inclusively with disempowered groups and coalition members (Doerr 2018a).