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- Convenors:
-
Nina Gren
(Lund University)
Sébastien Bachelet (University of Manchester)
Halvar Andreassen Kjærre (University of Bergen)
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- Discussant:
-
Paolo Gaibazzi
(University of Bologna)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- U6-8
- Start time:
- 21 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Rome
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Migration and asylum regimes shape the forms and content of human life. This panel asks how migrants navigate them, and the modes of existence and experience to which their navigation gives rise.
Long Abstract:
The politics of mobility have assumed a central role not only in the government of populations across the world but also in shaping the very form and content of human life. Such politics constitute therefore an interesting site for addressing the legacy of anthropological research and thought on the human condition. Would-be migrants invest hope and resources into migration as a way of pursuing a respectable life and/or escaping social death. Restrictive conditions of entry and permanence in a number of countries force many, however, to undertake dangerous journeys and to continually revise their options. The experience, or simply the danger, of irregularization, encampment, detention and deportation shape their understandings of freedom and constraint, mobility and immobility, success and failure. Asylum and integration policies similarly create novel life opportunities as well as impasses. This panel calls for contributions that describe how migrants (and other actors of migration) navigate migration and asylum regimes. It further focuses on these navigations as laboratories of life in the making: which sociality, cultural notions and practices, political forces, and modes of consciousness do migrants mobilize, reproduce or invent in order to confer meaning and form on their existence?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Many young Tunisians think about Europe and search for a liveable life abroad. Their intangible desire of migrating often faces the very tangible limitations of migration policies. Faith in God and the belief in the power of His will can be an empowerment tool for undocumented migrants.
Paper long abstract:
Most of the Tunisian undocumented migrants (harragas) I met during my fieldwork have grown up in a sort of immobility situated in a specific place which is their neighborhood (al houma). They spent most of the time in this specific neighborhood. Such a life may look very static from the outside but the harragas are often already mobile in their minds. This mobility is made possible thanks to different factors, mainly via the returning migrants and the social media, which lead to the development of mental representations. The harragas constantly think about Europe and search for a liveable life. However, their intangible desire of migrating often faces the very tangible limitations of migration policies. How do they manage to reach their goal when facing such mobility restrictions? Faith in God and the belief in the intangible power of His will can be a an empowerment tool . The belief in divine justice and in destiny (maktoub) is often mobilised by my interlocutors and it influences their representations of mobility. This sometimes leads prospective migrants to take risk to reach their goals, because they believe that their future is linked to God's will and that divine laws are above human laws. Every obstacle looks surmountable in this perspective and future looks brighter.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores issues of uncertainty and hope amongst irregular, sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco where crossing into Europe has become almost impossible. I examine how migrants navigate the multiple powers influencing their ‘quest for a life more bearable.’
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork amongst irregular, sub-Saharan migrants living in Morocco, this paper focuses on issues of uncertainty and hope. Self-identifying as 'adventurers', sub-Saharan migrants describe their contrived mobility as the need 'to exit' (sortir) in order to reach 'the objective' (l'objectif): a shifting epithet for the realization of their life aspirations. In this paper, I am concerned with how sub-Saharan migrants make sense of failure and success when they attempt to cross the border into Spain - what they call 'the shock' (le choc) in reference to the violent encounter with the 'migration apparatus' set to prevent crossing into Europe.
Firstly, this paper explores the notion of 'the right mentality' - what adventurers need in order 'to find one's self' (se chercher). When attempting to cross the border, migrants simultaneously assert their own power ('strength' and 'courage') in overcoming obstacles and acknowledge its limits ('chance') ultimately set by God. Yet, such balance is fragile - migrants on a 'quest for a life more bearable' risk 'becoming mad'. Having 'the right mentality' is also the basis of trust and solidarity (e.g. to embark together on pneumatic dinghies). This paper examines how other migrants and distant kin shape adventurers' journeys and sometimes lead to conflicting influences and moral conundrums. Whilst it is morally wrong to thwart travelling companions' opportunities, migrants may leave others behind as they cannot miss the prospect of reaching the objective for themselves and their distant kin.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on involuntary return migration to Ghana, analyzing the interplay between migrants’ social obligations and aspirations for maturity versus notions of hope, risk and luck after deportation or evacuation from conflict.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary migration is characterized by a mobility paradox. The increased reach and accessibility of communication, media and transport technologies mean that people in many parts of the world are exposed to visions of the good life elsewhere while restrictive mobility regimes makes access to legal mobility increasingly difficult.
In this paper I employ hope as an analytical framework to study this mobility paradox, highlighting potentiality as well as uncertainty. The paper focuses on involuntary return migration to Ghana, such as deportation from North Africa and Europe and evacuation from Libya following the civil war. I ask how involuntary returnees, their families and local communities understand and deal with this situation, analyzing notions of hoped-for futures and a meaningful life and where these futures and lives are perceived to be located. I argue that high-risk livelihood migration is related to gendered notions and practices of maturity, social obligations, and possibilities for accumulation and 'exposure' which are widely seen as lacking in Ghana for people without much money, education or connections - or access to regular international migration. Migration in this situation is inspired by the success of previous migrants and embedded in an ethos of necessity to avoid social stagnation; hope for realizing a good future in Ghana is thus located elsewhere. However it is also related to pain and notions of risk and (bad) luck, constituting an economy of suffering and potentiality, characterized by uncertainty and made more dangerous and difficult by conflict and the intensification of migration control.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses some young male Palestinian refugees in Sweden. They were enrolled in a state-run integration program, but they felt it was a waste of time. They wanted to continue their education. They even felt that the power of Swedish bureaucracy constrained rather than supported their aspirations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the accounts of some young male Palestinian refugees in Sweden. They had applied and been accepted for political asylum for slightly different reasons and had arrived from different parts of the Palestinian diasporic space. However, they had more in common than what divided them. At the time of fieldwork, they were enrolled in a state-run integration program, which included language courses, internships, state-subsidized employments and evaluations of degrees and of professional experiences. But a liveable life for my interlocutors was not just about safety, work and political rights such as asylum, democracy and future citizenship. They all wanted to continue their higher education and secure a good social position. Their political reasons to flee were interconnected with an imaginary of (social) mobility (Appadurai 1991; Salazar 2011). In their eyes, being enrolled in the integration program, coordinated by the Swedish Public Employment Service, was not a useful way to reach this goal. On the contrary, they felt that the power of Swedish bureaucracy and individual bureaucrats was unpredictable and constrained rather than supported their aspirations. There was a sense of meaningless-ness and frustration to their lives in Sweden. The individuals I involved in my study understood and reacted to these constraints in different ways. In this paper, I will discuss the strategies my interlocutors employed when trying to understand, endure, avoid and/or tame the "Swedish System" and to regain power over their lives with inspiration from Jackson's writings on existential well-being (2011).
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will attempt to move beyond the metaphorical use of im/mobility by looking into the ways individuals whose lives would commonly be described in terms of a heightened sense of mobility actively make sense of these categories in their daily lives.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I will attempt to move beyond the metaphorical use of im/mobility by looking into the ways individuals actively make sense of these categories in their daily lives. Focusing on the lifeworlds of a group of unaccompanied minors from Eritrea who after long and perilous journeys made their way to Switzerland, I will zoom in on the ambiguous, brief and often forceful moments when they experienced their lives as being-in-movement or as being-stuck. I will pay particular attention to the importance the young people attached to education as a way of moving forward in their lives. These hopes of movement-through-education often propelled the young people during their dangerous journeys through the Libyan desert and across the Mediterranean. I will discuss what happens when these imaginaries of mobility clash with the reality of a restrictive asylum system that curtails the young people's educational possibilities and opportunities to move forward in their lives. By zooming in on particular moments when the teenagers experienced, imagined, or narrated their lives in terms of movement, or when they felt they had reached an impasse, I will shed light on the dialectical ways mobility and immobility enter into and envelop everyday lives.
Paper short abstract:
Through the concepts of mètis and bie, this contribution discusses how foreign-nationals facing incarceration, detention and deportation adapt to their changing situations and influence the relations of power at play, as prisoners, detainees, and undocumented migrants.
Paper long abstract:
During the past four decades, growing numbers of foreign-nationals in both France and the USA have lost their legal status and have faced incarceration, detention, and subsequent deportation on grounds of their violation of immigration or criminal legislation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and biographical interviews with foreign-nationals at different stages of their incarceration and their deportation process in the Paris and New York metropolitan areas, this presentation discusses their possible responses - whether individual tactics and strategies or their participation in forms of collective mobilizations - to these experiences. While the concept of 'social navigation' has often been mobilized in migration studies, I have chosen to draw on that of mètis (cunning, strategy, patience, participation) and its opposite bie (impulse, immediate reaction, impatience, brute force) because these concepts allow to distinguish analytically between two different ways of reacting to and adapting to new situations (Vernant 1971 ; Détienne & Vernant 1974 ; Scott 1998). Futher, the sailing metaphor of 'social navigation' implies that the individual cannot influence the social forces that constrain or enable different forms of behavior: the wind, the elements, are not for a sailor to change. Mètis, by contrast, recognizes that an individual not only adapts to social forces but that his or her actions can also contribute to alter them. It thus provides a more precise analytical tool, I argue, to assess the diversity of ways in which immigration law, prison regulations, or deportation practises can also be challenged and transformed by the persons whom they target.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the fragmented journeys of irregularised migrants within the Schengen area. How are their trajectories shaped by aspirations to find a place to stay and what information plays a role in directing these movements?
Paper long abstract:
Despite all the obstacles there are thousands of persons who manage to enter Europe and circumvent the increasingly selective migration control. Many of them are on the move for years, cover long distances and cross several borders in the hope of meeting with their aspirations. Their hopes are held up because of hearing success stories from co-migrants and trajectories are shaped according to such rumours.
The ethnographic study follows migrants on their fragmented journeys within Europe on their search for a "chance". Limited access to legalization often leads to a complex migration pattern that is characterised by the following aspects: 1) durable "transit" across Europe; 2) a high degree of flexibility to respond to suddenly changing conditions, and 3) switching between different legal statuses. The experiences of these migrants show a deep ambivalence between a sense of autonomy, on the one hand, and of profound hope- and powerlessness, on the other.
Given the fact that little is known about these fragmented journeys, this paper provides insights into a highly pertinent migration pattern, the impact of the European migration management on individual migrants as well as the inter-relatedness of the asylum regime and irregular migration in Europe. At the same time these movements are an excellent example to discuss mobility as a resource on the one hand (since it enables migrants to extend their presence in Europe) and as a handicap on the other (since it impedes the building of stable social networks, the planning of the future, etc.).
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on recent fieldwork among rejected asylum seekers from Afghanistan throughout Europe, this paper delineates how institutions of migration control takes part in generating a new class of mobile subjects and how these institutions contributes to their mobile existence rather than limiting it.
Paper long abstract:
In Northern Europe bilateral return agreements and deportation programs are currently the main instruments evoked to deal with the unwanted presence of irregular migrants who do not return voluntarily. Still, as I will argue in this paper, such restrictive measures seldom reduce migrant mobility. In many ways they are rather producing it. For the Afghani migrants I follow in my research, deportation and detention is often a calculated risk and a part of their mobile lives. In their search for liveable lives for themselves or their families, many Afghani migrants continue to crisscross the Schengen borders despite their illegalized existence. They draw on contextual networks that are generated by the "asylum system" itself combined with sociocultural notions of hospitality and the normative plights to help and get help by others. The aspirations and rumours that permeate the institutions they inhabit becomes a main principle of navigation. While some migrants are subsequently deported to Afghanistan. Others are deported to Southern Europe (mainly Italy) where many are given a permission to stay but few prospects for integration and income. Being deported to these countries seldom marks the end of their journeys. Drawing on recent fieldwork among Afghani migrants throughout Europe this paper delineates how the institutions of asylum and migration control takes part in generating a new class of mobile subjects, how these institutions contribute to their mobile existence, and how this illegalized mobility, in turn, becomes a way of human existence itself.