Tererai Obey Sithole

PhD candidate at UiA

I am a PhD Research Fellow at the University of Agder in the Department of Global Development and Planning where I am part of the Centre for Integrated Emergency Management (CIEM) and Mobility, Culture & Gender research groups. My current research focuses on citizen-driven aid exploring how aid actors are motivated to engage in amateur humanitarian interventions and how the initiatives are organized and sustained with the support of digital technologies. I attained a Masters in Global Development & Planning from the University of Agder as well where I submitted a thesis titled Beyond Forced Migration: Refugees’ everyday lives and their state of wellbeing; The Case of Rhino Camp Settlement, Uganda. I am also a Zimbabwean human rights defender, and I use social media as a tool for advocacy and communication to bridge the gap of distance between me and other activists who are back home.

Tell us about your project!

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, multitudes of people fled Ukraine in search of a safety haven in other parts of Europe and beyond leading to a fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War 2. Thus, this project focuses on citizen-driven humanitarian initiatives that emerged during the early days of the crisis to intervene by providing humanitarian needs at a time when state actors and international NGOs were not visible on the ground. The project explores different strategies that were adopted by citizens to mobilize resources and encourage voluntary action from communities. Interest is placed on how digital technologies were used to trigger humanitarian interest amongst actors as well as to organize and sustain these various unconventional humanitarian initiatives studied in this project. The research employs are qualitative research approach wherein ethnographic fieldwork, digital ethnography and participant observation are employed as data collection methods.

“ Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, multitudes of people fled Ukraine in search of a safety haven in other parts of Europe and beyond leading to a fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War 2”

— Tererai Obey Sithole on his PhD project “Citizen aid in times of humanitarian crisis: experiences from Poland”.