How is it possible to gain a sense that you have a voice and that your life matters when you have lost everything and live your life as a ‘displaced person’ in extreme precarity? We explore this question by examining the mundane everyday organizing practices of Syrian refugees living in tented settlements in Lebanon. Contrasting traditional empirical settings within organization studies where an already placed and mattering subject can be assumed, our context provides an opportunity to reveal how relations of recognition and mattering become constituted, and how subjects in precarious settings become enacted as such. Specifically, drawing on theories on the relational enactment of self and other, we show how material-discursive boundary-making and invitational practices—organizing a home, cooking and eating, and organizing a digital ‘home’—function to enact relational host/guest subject positions. We also disclose how these guest/host relationalities create the conditions of possibility for the enactment of a subject that matters, and for the despair enacted in everyday precarious life to transform into ‘undefeated despair’.

当你失去一切并在极端不稳定的情况下作为一个“流离失所者”过着你的生活时，怎么可能获得一种你有发言权并且你的生命很重要的感觉？我们通过研究居住在黎巴嫩帐篷定居点的叙利亚难民的日常组织实践来探讨这个问题。对比组织研究中的传统经验设置，其中可以假设一个已经放置和重要的主题，我们的背景提供了一个机会来揭示承认和重要的关系是如何构成的，以及在不稳定的环境中的主题是如何被制定的。具体来说，利用关于自我和他人关系制定的理论，我们展示了物质话语的边界制定和邀请实践——组织家庭、烹饪和吃饭，并组织一个数字“家”——功能来制定相关的主人/客人主题位置。我们还揭示了这些客人/主人的关系如何为重要主题的制定以及将日常生活不稳定生活中的绝望转变为“不败的绝望”创造了可能性条件。