Shadow Practices of Care, Access, Shame and Racism in a Rotterdam Soup Kitchen

This paper is concerned with shadow infrastructures of care through ethnographic research andvolunteer work at a soup kitchen in Rotterdam. It looks at how shadow care practices are shapedthrough daily negotiations around access to food, shame and racism during the breakdown ofausterity politics. I draw on nine months of combined volunteer work and participant observationresearch. Three detailed personas are crafted from multiple visitors to show how guests andvolunteers navigate felt and unfelt responsibilities while mediating conflicts. The personas ofSusan, Fahid, and John show how access to care is continuously negotiated through interactionsinvolving sensory experiences, racial dynamics, and bodily vulnerability. The soup kitchen ischaracterised by fundamental ambiguities that simultaneously include and exclude, care andcontrol in response to structural inequities, suggesting that the expertise demonstrated by guestsin navigating complex institutional landscapes represents knowledge that justifies a suspiciousattitude to urban governance.