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- Convenors:
-
Elena Borisova
(University of Sussex)
Jérémie Voirol (University of Manchester)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building (LAN), 01/052
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to generate insights about how migrants carve out lives worth living without reducing their experiences to the suffering inflicted by oppressive migration regimes, and what purchase current trends in anthropologies of the good and morality have to offer to migration research.
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to generate insights about how migrants carve out lives worth living and create the good in different domains of their lives without reducing their experiences to the suffering inflicted by oppressive migration regimes. It explores what analytical and empirical purchase current trends in anthropologies of the good and morality have to offer to migration research. As Katerina Rozakou argued (2019), our gaps in knowledge about migration originate not necessarily from the lack of access to certain sites, such as refugee camps and detention centres, but from our epistemological imagination, which colours our writing with 'particular aesthetic modalities'. Although recent research on migration has paid attention to the relationship between (im)mobility and the imaginative, the desired, and the hoped for, much of current migration scholarship is still produced along the lines of 'suffering slot anthropology' (Robbins 2013). Without downplaying the importance of critically analysing the issues of power, violence and inequalities, we ask, how can moving beyond the 'analytic of desperation' (Elliot 2020) help us understand the multiplicity of lived experiences of (im)mobility in their fullness? How can we balance out the focus between suffering, violence and power with attention to the good? And how can this approach further destabilise the worn out dichotomies, such as forced/voluntary, economic/humanitarian migration premised upon different hierarchically organised types of suffering that dominate public and policy-making discourse? We welcome submissions grounded in fine-grained ethnographic research across different contexts that look at migrants' and their families' projects of self-fashioning and creating valuable lives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
How do refugees who were granted protection in Norway and Switzerland employ notions like “safety” or “healing” to conceptualize a new and meaningful life? Drawing on ethnographic narratives, this paper explores emic strategies and tactics of remaking amidst constraints of the asylum regime.
Paper long abstract:
Our paper explores how refugees who were granted long-term legal protection conceptualize a new and meaningful life through notions like “safety” or “healing”. New beginnings are conditional on peoples’ recovery from experiences of various forms of violence. They can be informed by different meanings and practices of safety and healing.
Asylum creates a foundation upon which refugees’ desires and hopes for a new life can take shape. Contemporary national and global trends in refugee governance, however, are far from revolving around protection and recovery alone. Welfare states across Europe tie asylum to manifold requirements, often framed as integration. These requirements tend to have ambiguous and constraining effects on individuals’ everyday lives and their hopes and prospects for a new beginning. While social bonds and often traumatic memories continue shaping their lives after arrival, many refugees feel moral obligations to gratefully contribute to the host society’s good fortune. Acknowledging such entanglements of past and present experiences and (trans)national asylum politics, we shed new conceptual and empirical light on meanings, experiences and conditions of remaking lives (Das & Kleinman 2001).
We draw on ethnographic narratives on refugee settlement in Norway and Switzerland to explore emic conceptions of healing and safety which inform strategies and tactics of remaking (De Certeau 1988). In this way, we transcend the suffering subject in a dual sense: empirically by focusing on persons who were granted protection and, theoretically, by placing meanings and practices of healing and safety amidst given constraints at the centre of our analyses.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore how migrants from the former Soviet Union in Germany (Osnabrück) search for ‘the good life’ and cope with social, political and economic realities around them. In what ways does the community life influence members' understanding of the ‘good life’?
Paper long abstract:
Ways of living possible ‘good life’ in Germany. The Migrants from the USSR in Osnabrück
Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne
nino.aivazishvili-gehne@univie.ac.at
In this paper I explore how migrants from the former Soviet Union in Germany (Osnabrück) search for ‘the good life’ and cope with social, political and economic realities around them. Engaging with a group of people organised informally around a ‘Georgian’ association (Osnabrücker Deutsch-Georgischer Kulturverein e.V. officially founded in 2019), the following questions guide my analysis: What new arrangements of belonging are formed among the migrants and why? In what ways does the community life influence members' understanding of the ‘good life’?
Through the extensive ethnographic fieldwork I show how the community sociality and active engagement in it (mutual help and get together) turn into the important ways and spaces for living a ‘good life’ in Germany. Cohesion as a community helps to overcome strangeness, distance from home, creating instead the joyful feelings. Focusing on the “good”, my material provides a “humane counterweight to the darkness of the work of neoliberal oppression and governmental constraint" (Ortner 2016: 60) framed as “dark anthropology” (ibid.). Since power and inequality, and the damage they impose, cannot be the whole of anthropology, this paper takes a caring and ethical approach, offering new perspectives to migrant people lives (ibid., see also Fassin 2018).
Cited References
Fassin, D. 2018. Life. A critical user’s manual. Medford: Polity Press.
Ortner, S. 2016. Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties. In. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47-73.
Paper short abstract:
By showcasing the home-making efforts of asylum seekers and refugees in Zagreb (Croatia), this paper aims to overcome the representation of refugees as passive and suffering subjects and instead shows the ways in which they are actively anticipating a future worth living.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes asylum seekers' and refugees' home-making efforts in Zagreb (Croatia). While acknowledging the many obstacles and inequalities that people who are put into those categories have to overcome daily, this research tries to move beyond the 'analytic of desperation' (Elliot 2020). It focuses on their futural orientations, especially on Bryant and Knight's concepts of anticipation, expectation, and hope (2019). The paper follows contemporary definitions that conceptualize home as a fluid plurilocal process rather than geographically rooted space (Čapo 2019; Rapport and Overing 2003) and adds onto them by asking not only where but also when is home. Based on the ethnographic research among asylum seekers and refugees mainly from the Global South, who came to Zagreb during and after the "long summer of migration" in 2015, the author aims to show their efforts to renegotiate and reconstruct everyday life, home, and sense of belonging. The paper considers some of the various obstacles refugees face, such as accommodation and housing, or access to education and the labor market, while simultaneously highlighting their struggles to overcome those barriers and secure a future for themselves and their families. In doing so, the paper aims to surmount the representation of refugees as passive and suffering subjects that are simply waiting to return to their supposed homelands and instead shows the ways in which they are actively anticipating the future worth living.
Paper short abstract:
This paper approaches family letter writing for migrants as an individual yet universal human practice of homing, which aims at challenging the dominant epistemological assumptions about ‘bitter’ migrant experiences, therefore to de-label and to emancipate ‘suffering subject’ in migration research.
Paper long abstract:
During the 19th- and 20th-centuries, there were large-scale waves of Chinese migration—stimulated by hunger and the search for paid work—that moved from South China to Southeast Asia. The enormous amount of remittances sent from those migrants to their families in China were accompanied by qiaopi family letters. The uniqueness of its genre, the sizeable collection (over 160,000 pieces), and the rich content (ranging from personal emotions to political concerns), prompted UNESCO to recognise qiaopi as documentary heritage—‘Memory of the World’. In most recent qiaopi related research, those labour migrants are often labelled as ‘fanke’ (foreign guests) in a predetermined manner embedded with stylised discourses, being placed in the position of a kind of ‘victim’, suffering their 'bitterness' for the sake of their home, their homeland, or their patriotism. Differently, grounded in existential anthropology (e.g. Jackson 1995, 2005) and cosmopolitan anthropology (e.g. Rapport 2014, 2018), and based on a joint-method of archival, ethnographical, and phenomenological study for over 3000 pieces of qiaopi, I propose to examine migrant letters as a process in the marking that inscribes their authors’ individual consciousness—the way in which migrants ‘write’ their lives and ‘author’ their identities through family letter writing, a mental yet bodily state of feeling at home within oneself. ‘Homing as de-labelling’, therefore, aims at recognising the individual yet universal human practice of homing, to disrupt the dominant narratives of ‘bitter’ migrant experiences, and to challenge the epistemological assumptions about them, thus to de-label and to emancipate ‘suffering subject’ in migration research.