Volunteer agencies in Germany formulate the encounter "at eye level" as a central principle of volunteer support work for refugees (e.g. “Start with a Friend“, 2021). This is critically questioned in empirical-reconstructive research on this field (Thönneßen, 2020), insofar as the relations of inequality generated by the German asylum regime (Pelzer, 2018) also frame interaction and communication within volunteer work. On the one hand, volunteer support work for refugees is supposed to strengthen their social inclusion, on the other hand, it is part of the restrictive integration system and therefore has only limited possibilities, which is why hierarchical structures from society are often taken over into volunteer work and reproduced there (Decker, 2020). In addition, politicians often demand integration work from volunteers, which goes hand in hand with assimilation, instead of inclusion (Thönneßen, 2020). Volunteer work in the context of forced migration is thus understood as a complex structure of inclusion and exclusion mechanisms (Hilse-Carstensen, Meusel & Zimmermann, 2019). Recent studies therefore focus on power asymmetry within volunteer support work in the context of forced migration (Bauerschaper, 2019; Jursch et al., 2020; Sprung & Kukovetz, 2017), with far more studies addressing the perspective of volunteers than that of refugee participants. According to Jungk and Morrin, volunteer participants notice an asymmetry of power (2017), while according to Schiefer, the refugee participants of tandem relationships do not perceive paternalism or at least do not judge it as negative, but emphasize “that helplessness and dependence on others are normal in the beginning“ (Schiefer, 2017, p. 72, translated by the authors).
Following on from this state of research, our research interest lies in the subjective perception of power asymmetries in volunteer support work for refugees by participating actors. In our contribution, we shed light on the following related research questions: What factors reinforce or reduce power asymmetries within tandem meetings from the respondents’ perspective? How do tandem partners deal with power asymmetries? In order to address these questions we include both perspectives of refugees who have participated in (institutionally or privately organized) tandem relationship projects and perspectives of university students who have participated as volunteers in institutionally organized tandem relationships within a service learning seminar.

The data so far consists of, among other sources, seventeen semi-structured problem-centered interviews (Witzel, 2000) which were guided by our research interest to reconstruct the experiences of refugees and students who took part in a tandem relationship. For this type of interview the interviewer “ensures that respondents remain close to the topic, but often leaves enough space for the interviewee to open up the discussion and introduce connected topics, thus making it more exploratory in nature” (Fedyuk & Zentai, 2018). This method is a theory-generating procedure in which both narrative and comprehension-generating questions are used to ascertain the subjective views of the interviewees. In addition to the questions previously set out in the interview guide, the knowledge generated within the interviews is used as a source for follow-up-questions (Witzel, 2000). This interplay of induction and deduction seemed to be adequate in view of the data analysis with the Grounded Theory methodology (Charmaz, 2014). According to Charmaz’s line-by-line initial coding, we have already carried out an initial analysis of the interview material. Following on from this, we started to form preliminary categories from some interviews according to Charmaz’s focused coding. The first period of interview conduction took place in November and December 2019 and resulted in nine interviews with university students taking part in a service learning seminar. These were conducted by a student assistant who was a former participant of this seminar and interviewed her classmates, so we were able to realize peer interviews. A second period of interview conduction took place in January and May 2021 and was being realized by a university student whose master thesis was located in our research project. This approach, university students interviewing their peers, seemed reasonable considering research ethics, so as not to give the students the impression that their participation in the interview could be related to the evaluation of their academic performance. Compared to our contribution at ECER 2021 and building on it, we expand the data corpus by three interviews with refugees and five additional interviews with students. This enables us to shed light on the perspective of the refugees on the one hand and to take a more differentiated look at the perspective of the students on the other hand. In addition to the interviews, we collected twenty-two portfolios that students wrote to reflect on their experiences during the seminar and in their relationship with their tandem partners.

Following other research in the context of volunteer work with refugees, our analysis also shows that power asymmetries play into tandem meetings. The participants evaluate the power asymmetry differently and individually develop different strategies to deal with it: The university students on the one hand perceive power asymmetry in situations in which they see it as unjustified as negative and try to avoid it (“the situation was already partly very unusual, because I was the contact person but I was almost twenty years younger with less professional experience and my own or only skills were that I speak fluent German“). On the other hand they actively construct hierarchical situations in which they see the hierarchy as legitimized, for example by slipping into the role of German teachers. The refugee participants also try to reduce power asymmetry and use different strategies for this. For example, they make their tandem partners aware of their paternalistic behavior or break off such situations. In addition, we were able to determine that hierarchical role assignments and perceptions were exclusively related to the concrete tandem meetings by the refugee participants, while the students tended to generalize these role assignments. Furthermore, the refugee participants have the impression that they themselves take away more than their tandem partners from the tandem meetings, which again reproduces and reinforces hierarchies interactively. In the discussion we theorize our findings on the basis of the concept of white saviorism (Cole, 2012; for its reception in educational science, see Aronson, 2017 and Sondel, Kretchmar & Dunn, 2019), which is used in particular in the field of international volunteering to describe (mostly unconsciously) condescending and white privileges and dominance cementing ways of acting of helpers from the Global North towards people from the Global South (see Bandyopadhyay, 2019).

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