Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic paper explores lived experiences of becoming and being old to capture the agency, social navigation and interdependencies embedded in older people's experiences of being 'stuck' in a sub-Saharan African city.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sets out new directions for understanding ageing, (im)mobility and agency in urban sub-Saharan Africa. Building on the new mobilities paradigm which links individual experiences of mobility and urban space, and drawing on ethnographic and creative participatory research with older men and women in the Ugandan city of Jinja, this paper explores what it is to become and be old. I explore 'becoming old' to capture the diversity of trajectories and social navigation embedded in older people's experiences of being 'stuck' in the city, and 'being old' to foreground the contingent and relational spatialities, temporalities and agency of their lived experiences of immobility. Firstly, I set out a renewed understanding of how older people engage with 'stuckness' in the socio-economic and physical infrastructures and horizons of rapidly changing African cities. Secondly, I propose a new conceptual approach, 'dependent navigation', to explore how older people engage with and navigate ambivalent dependencies in urban contexts.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the dialogical interactions between migration imaginaries and suspension in mobilities in the context of temporary migration. Suspension shifts migrants' life focus from the present moments to the imagined future, transforming waiting times into precariousness and opportunities.

Paper long abstract:

This research examines the dialogical interactions between migration imaginaries and suspension in mobilities in the context of two forms of temporary migration among young Chinese migrants to the UK: student migrants and working holiday makers. In this paper, I scrutinise how suspension shifts migrants' life focus from the present moments to the imagined future, and how this process is driven by migrants' aspirations, desires and capacities. I argue that suspension happens on three levels during a temporary migrant's trajectory. Firstly, in the quest for a foreign degree or international work experience, self-inflicted suspension happens when migrants choose to suspend their local networks and career opportunities in their country of origin. Secondly, although migrants may voluntarily suspend some aspects of their lives in order to maximise others for the imagined future, structural constraints imposed by the temporality of migration and visa regime may also forcibly suspend migrants' geographical and social mobility. Thirdly, I focus on migrants' lived experiences to explore how suspension, taking the form of waiting times involved in visa applications and the switching of visas when they expire, has become a normalised aspect of migrants' staggered journeys. Particularly, I look into how suspension and the state of temporariness shape migrants' intimate lives, specifically their short-term love relationships or marriages, transforming waiting times into precariousness in existing relationships, and romance opportunities for singletons. This article contributes to migration studies by providing a fresh understanding of the relationship between imagination and suspension as a part of lived migration experiences.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses awkward encounters with young men participating in a Sport-for-Development programme at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in The Gambia, West Africa to explore discourses of mobility, immobility and imagined global relationships

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores my awkward encounters with young men participating in a Sport-for-Development programme at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in The Gambia, West Africa. Situating my analysis in relation to heated discourses of youth mobility and immobility stemming from an outflow of young Gambians via dangerous migratory routes, I explore my own relationship to young men I tutored by looking at three ethnographic moments linked by their relation to mobility and imagined global relationships. Firstly, I show how Gambian perceptions of Western intervention and development are both mediated and altered through particular personal relationships governed by structural inequalities. Secondly, I locate these debates in stories of sport and mobility, exploring how imaginary narratives of sporting success intersect both with government rhetoric urging young men to remain at home and actual travel and success offered by sporting exploits. Finally, I locate these debates in the constellation of local Islamic identities in relation to global imaginaries of power and inequality discussing how Islamic readings of globalisation render economic and political processes in 'Manichean terms' such as 'The West' versus 'The Rest' through which young Muslims articulate complex situational identities. As I show, these 'awkward' moments show how desires to migrate, travel and escape emerged, providing the grounds for powerful imaginaries of mobility at work through the YMCA and, indeed, through my presence in The Gambia.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an ethnographic details of the culture of migration and the rearrangement of gender boundary in a patriarchal Muslim society in rural Bangladesh. The study explores the continuity and changes in the discourse and practices of traditional gender roles in the village.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an ethnographic account of the culture of migration and the transformation in patriarchal structure of a Muslim society in rural Bangladesh. In doing so, the study explores the continuity and changes in the discourse and practices of traditional gender roles of men and women of Rashidpur village in Munshiganj district, Bangladesh. It pays especial attention to local and global interconnections of the aspirant migrants and their household members, changes in their gender based mobility and their contribution to the changes in patriarchal ideology. The study is conducted from January to December, 2017, applying ethnographic method, which examines gender based career planning and the lived reality of the villagers. Especially, the study focuses on the determining factors, which shape the migration decision of men particularly, the grown up boys. Though the findings of the study indicate the diversity and multiplicity of rural life, women's career plans are, in many cases, submitted to the will of patriarchy to retain the honor of their men. On the other hand, men's career plans are fulfilled by the household members to ensure their bread winning. In such situation, many women change their ambition and want to be the wives of the migrants to enjoy freedom when husbands are abroad. Overall, migration aspiration and the linked activities of the villagers transform the local social structure as a whole. The study contextualizes structure and agency to understand how patriarchal structure influences individuals and how individuals play a role to transform the structure in exchange.

Paper short abstract:

In the context of migration between Uttar Pradesh, other areas of India and the Gulf, this article explores the role of the imagination in shaping subjective experiences of male Muslim migrants from a woodworking industry in the North Indian city of Saharanpur.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of migration between Uttar Pradesh, other areas of India and the Gulf, this article explores the role of the imagination in shaping subjective experiences of male Muslim migrants from a woodworking industry in the North Indian city of Saharanpur. Through attending to the dreams, aspirations and hopes of labour migrants the article argues that bridging the material and the imagined is critical to understanding, not just patterns of migration, but also the subjective experiences of migrants themselves. Through a descriptive ethnographic account, involving journeys with woodworkers over one and a half years, the article explores the ways in which migration, its effects and connections are shaped by the imagination, yet are also simultaneously active in shaping the imagination, a process which is self-perpetuating. Emerging from this, the article gives attention to continuity at the material, personal and more emotive level. This runs counter to many accounts which situate migration as rupturing or change driving within both the social and the subjective. These continuities play out in complex ways providing comfort and familiarity but also enabling the imaginations of migrants to be subverted, co-opted, influenced and structured to meet the demands of labour markets both domestically and abroad.

Paper short abstract:

Young people in Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia commonly construct their "life projects" in Europe as Western ideologies map out a trajectory in the collective imagination: from the "backward" village to the "modern" city and ultimately to the "real" site of progress - the West.

Paper long abstract:

It is common in recent anthropology to emphasize positive outcomes of global cultural processes for the identity, aspirations and imagination of people around the world. As the horizons of the social, collective imagination have widened to encompass global possibilities, this process has been described as "freeing the imagination". Indeed, the imaginary "life projects" of many young Africans today are constructed on the global, rather than local scale. Migration to Europe is a common dream in Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia. Europe - which is remote but at the same time present, almost inaccessible and yet powerfully attractive - is a parallel, rival reality in which one's "constructed life" is located. As a consequence, dreams and ambitions of young men - often for years - centre around Europe, preventing them from investing in their future locally. Self-perceptions are shaped by the presence of that elsewhere in the collective imagination. Rather than freeing the imagination, the global circulation of Western ideologies and images of the West seems to have mapped out a certain trajectory in the collective imagination of West Africans: from the "backward" village to the "modern" city. But as the reality often does not support the village/town dichotomy, ultimately the trajectory leads to the "real" site of progress, the West. Development is primarily a temporal ideology. Reaching progress is envisioned in it as a question of time. In countries in which economic progress for various reasons does not occur, however, it becomes a spatial one delineated on a global scale.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the lived experiences of sub-Saharan migrants moving to and through Libya, this paper argues that attending to the complex dynamics between mobility and immobility on unauthorised journeys is vital to understanding forces connecting people's mobility experiences and imaginations.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on the lived mobility experiences of sub-Saharan migrants in Libya, this paper examines the complex relationship between mobility and immobility on unauthorised journeys and its bearings upon migrants' mobility imaginations. The label of 'crisis', often linked to the migration situation in Libya and the Mediterranean, tends to impose a linear understanding of movement and to fixate migrants as static legal-political bodies aiming for Europe. Through a multi-sited ethnography of migrants' unauthorised journeys through the Sahara desert and Libya by boat to Europe, the paper shows that migrants' mobilities are far from linear, reconfiguring typologized understandings of migrants as legal/illegal, forced/voluntary, refugee and asylum seeker in non-binary and fluid ways. I highlight how spaces of immobility in Libya, shaped by different criminal and state actors and the payment of money to move on, characterise migrants' journeys and imaginations of movement: informal confinement, imprisonment in government-run detention centres, waiting in private houses and imagining better futures. The paper concludes by arguing that a focus on the dynamics between mobility and immobility, and taking journeys seriously as a topic of anthropological study, is vital to understanding forces connecting people's mobility experiences and the imaginations motivating them.

Paper short abstract:

With reference to asylum seekers' experiences, as these are accessed by an approach of "being there", I suggest how asylum seekers transform and embed a variety and mobilities of identity, belonging and wellbeing.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on how asylum seekers in Norway struggle with challenges in social experiences and materialities that shape identity, belonging and wellbeing. Places and the related environments and material structures are seen as both catalysts and embodiments of societal change and express not only cultural values, but also form conditions for group- and individual identities and belonging, as well as active (inter)relations and interplay. While discussing such challenges characterised by marginalisation, stigmatisation and enclavement, I stress how the ethnographic approach of engaging in face-to-face relations can highlight knowledge creation as fundamentally generated in a complex web of relations between people distinctly positioned within social and environmental structures, and cultural values and meaning, emotions and imaginations. Recognising such relations, I argue how the subject always holds both a personal and social history, which cannot be fully grasped by symbols or language. With reference to asylum seekers' experiences, as these are accessed by an approach of "being there", I suggest how asylum seekers transform and embed a variety and mobilities of identity, belonging and wellbeing that respond to and reach beyond social marginalization and enclavement. More so, I argue that the migrant experience, further than asylum seekers, speaks of a human disposition of flexibility and imaginations in the becoming of self, belonging and wellbeing.

Paper short abstract:

Malian women's mobilities are associated with numerous meanings and partly constrained by Islamic, patriarchal and Mande ideals. Discourses on women's mobilities and the 'strangerhood' of women reflect notions of "ideal femininity" but also, alternative femininities and changing gender ideologies.

Paper long abstract:

African women have always migrated and female autonomous migration in West Africa is on the increase, partly due to the changing structure of economic activities since the 1990s. Despite increasing global attention to women's involvement in migration, very little research has looked at Malian women's different forms of mobility, beyond the "rural exodus" from the countryside into towns. In West Africa, women's mobilities tend to be restricted and regulated by men; hence, women are often not expected to be highly mobile or to migrate autonomously. This paper delves into some of the numerous and contested meanings associated with Malian women's mobilities and reflects on the wider discourses and ideologies upon which these meanings were founded. It draws on twelve months of fieldwork in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, with female traders of Malian backgrounds. The paper discusses the relevance of local Islamic, patriarchal and Mande ideals to understanding perceptions of and constraints upon women's mobilities, emphasising some of the conflicts over the meanings associated with women's mobilities. It then examines some of the parallels between migrancy and womanhood, as reflected in local terminology which linked womanhood to liminal or perpetual conditions of strangerhood. By looking at the meanings of women's mobilities it becomes possible to explore not only what "ideal femininity" looked like but also, to consider alternative femininities and the changing discourses on gender. The ongoing socio-economic transformations in the region, which entail increasing mobility and financial autonomy for women, demand a reconsideration of how to achieve "ideal" gender relations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the imagination, aspirations and self-transformation of the rural-urban migrant workers in contemporary China. It examines the socio-political milieu in which peasants' (im)mobility is constructed and experienced, and the dilemma of becoming urbanites.

Paper long abstract:

In the pre-socialist 1940s, Fei, famous anthropologist of China and former student of Malinowski, noted that, the degree of "immobility" and "enduring attachment to the soil" of Chinese peasants made it "abnormal for them to migrate" (1992[1947]). During socialist period that followed, free rural-to-urban movement was prohibited by the hukou (household registration) system. Comparable to the caste system, the hukou endows urban residents with privileges, which are denied to rural people. For those with a rural background, becoming urbanites has been perceived as something highly desirable.

The reform era since late 1970s has witnessed rural-urban mobility and the emergence of a social group termed nongmingong (literally 'peasant-workers' but usually translated as 'migrant workers'). Their total number reached 281 million in 2016. However, while working and living in the city and contributing hugely to China' economic growth, they are habitually seen as an "outer group" (Li 2003). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Chengdu, the biggest city in southwest China, where a large number of nongmingong concentrate, this paper is concerned with the imagination, aspirations and self-transformation of nongmingong during their migrating process. It examines the socio-political milieu in which peasants' (im)mobility is constructed and experienced, and the dilemma of becoming urbanites.

Migration in China can be compared to migration in the EU in the context of neoliberal globalisation, as well as to rural-urban migration during the Industrial Revolution in 19th century England. Migration in China is better understood when viewed as part of a changing, globalising world.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation intends to reflect on the rethinking of identity by indigenous women through the experience of mobility, in the north of Brazil,. From the countryside to the metropolis, they face different issues that rearrange practices and the imagination built upon the migration process.

Paper long abstract:

The following presentation surveys the issue related to the migration of indigenous women in the north of Brazil. More specifically, we'll go to Manaus in the Amazonas state to follow part of the life experiences, which are reflected by those women in their everyday lives. All of those I was in contact during the fieldwork, were from the countryside of Amazonas, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, and usually went to Manaus looking for more education and best job opportunities. Some of them went to the big city being called by a family member or friend that has already done the mobility.

This type of mobility has its specifications related to the matters of gender and ethnicity, that act upon their daily experience as indigenous people and as woman in a big metropolis, such as Manaus. Those experiences also impact on the awareness they get of the city, through their mobility as indigenous women. There's a self reflection upon what is being indigenous thorough the practices provided by the migration experience. Therefor, the prejudice and challenges faced in Manaus also reflect on the imaginary constructed regarding the native brazilian population, through countless stereotypes and narratives that forged the ideal of brazialianess.

By reflecting those cases, we can think of how the experience is reimagined and practiced as those women praise for a better life in the city, at the same time as they rethink their mother land, previous life, and own identity.