Paper short abstract:

Discussing how male migrants from Western Kenya deal with the unexpected difficulties of becoming successful men once they arrive in Nairobi, this paper proposes to shift the conceptual focus away from uncertainty and hope towards certainty and expectation (prepackaged hope = expectation).

Paper long abstract:

Education --- migration to the city --- formal employment and marriage --- return to the village as a wealthy man. Many Western Kenyan men have remained modern. They still perceive the path towards economic success as ready-made. They never hoped for, but expected success. Arriving in Pipeline, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most densely populated estates (roughly 200,000 inhabitants per square kilometer), many well-educated male migrants realize that success is more difficult to achieve than they had thought. Trapped between their own and others’ expectations to become a “provider” (giving up and returning home is not an option), they navigate the fine line between despair and certainty – a task they describe as producing “pressure” in both its psychological (e.g., suicidal thoughts, sleeplessness, aggressiveness) and physical forms (e.g., high blood pressure, ulcers, headaches).

Building upon eighteen months of fieldwork among male migrants in Pipeline, I suggest to shift anthropological attention away from hope and creativity to open up space to explore expectations and quite uncreative ways of dealing with “pressure” and the threat of failure. Instead of focusing on “hope”, aptly characterized by Pete Lockwood as “an existential force of productive uncertainty” (2020: 46), anthropologists should attempt to excavate the conceptual power of “expectations” as an ‘existential force of unproductive certainty’ that, in case the fulfilment of the expectations had been continuously postponed, resulted in some of the most stereotypical forms of male behavior during my fieldwork: bar fights, excessive weightlifting and consumption of alcohol, invocations of “brotherhood”, and gender-based violence.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on two young Asylum seekers in Berlin who narrate radical contrasts in their internal experiences of self before and after arriving in Europe. Examining the nature of their relationship to previous and future selves, I unpack the promises of transformation built into flight.

Paper long abstract:

What kind of hope is scripted into exile? This paper looks to unpack the promises of transformation built into experiences of flight. I follow the stories of two young, male, asylum seekers from Syria and Egypt who arrived in Berlin between 2015 and 2016. Both narrate radical contrasts in their internal experiences of selfhood before and after their journey to Europe. Both locate a kind of “split” in their conceptions of self, and relate to their past selves with a mixture of ambivalence, distance, and even disavowal. Yet where one seems to have navigated this transformation with a commitment to a new kind of rooted belonging, along with a strong commitment to his ‘present self’, the other restlessly speaks of leaving his life in Germany behind for newer pastures, insisting that radically different ‘future selves’ might be waiting for him elsewhere. I show how flight becomes a compelling script through which promises of futurity might be realised. Yet simultaneously, these investments come at the cost of ruptures and discontinuities in internal experiences of selfhood and environment. Together, these two stories, in a sense archetypal of the settled and unsettled poles of migrant experience, help examine the unique self-oriented aspects of the experience of flight, particularly in the lives of young men. I show how the potential of flight to transform - and not just provide security - is crucial to understanding the imaginaries of forced migration, arguing that the search for the ‘good self’ underpins these journeys in crucial ways.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines hopes and future-making practices of aspiring football migrants in West Africa, and self-aggrandizing narratives of hope and opportunity offered by the global football industry. The paper seeks to revisit anthropological debates on global inequality and distribution of hope.

Paper long abstract:

“Football is about opportunity, about hope … We need to find ways to include the whole world to give hope to Africans so that they don’t need to cross the Mediterranean in order to find maybe a better life but, more probably, death in the sea.” Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, January 2022.

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of young men from countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career and a strategy to migrate abroad. Inspired by some of their select few age-mates who have signed contracts with clubs in Europe, they see football as a migration trajectory both familiar and extraordinary, and join football academies that promise fulfilment of childhood dreams to earn a living through migration and play. For the young men, a key promise of football as a “career” is a life of dedication to the widely beloved sport, and the idea that discipline, training, and focus will bring results despite the odds, an ideology that trickles down from elite sports to numerous aspiring young men, mediated by images of successful (and wealthy) international footballers from Africa. This paper, based on fieldwork in Southwest Cameroon, examines these young men’s hopes, aspirations, and future-making practices, as well as self-congratulatory narratives of hope, opportunity, and inclusion (such as the one quoted above) offered by the multi-billion-dollar global football industry, in order to revisit anthropological debates on links between global inequality and distribution of hope.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores dance as a cultural resource that ensures mobility and provides Cubans with the opportunity to access difficult labor markets outside the island. Dance careers unfold between precarity and prestige in the context of growing dance consumerism and multicultural dance markets.

Paper long abstract:

The paper addresses the ways in which Cuban artistic and embodied labor is extracted and exchanged through the mechanisms of transnational mobilities. Cuba – as imaginative construction – holds a central position on the global dance marketplace, which values or devalues dancers for their race and ethnicity. For many young Cubans, dance careers on the international salsa scene, associated with notions of prestige and success, become viable alternatives to the otherwise difficult to access European labor market. Disenchanted with the promises of the Cuban Revolution and having no affective ties to its ideology, they envision themselves as future migrants in a world of better opportunities outside Cuba. Consumer goods and lifestyles associated with ‘the outside world’ are central to their experiences, while access to education and universal healthcare, considered achievements of the Revolution, bear little appeal. They live, work, and hope in a transnational space for which the role of imagination becomes central. An ‘elsewhere’ shapes their desires, aspirations, and potential career expectations, placing them in a state of permanent preparedness for migration. Other Cubans’ mobile practices create the premise for mobility and the expectations around what triggers mobility (artistic careers, family abroad, romantic involvements, friendships). Dance becomes a cultural resource that can ensure mobility, as bodily skills and cultural capital are employed in order to secure sources of income. Dance careers hold the promise of transformation into independent, self-sustaining performers, yet they unfold on a dance market that exposes dancers to periods of irregular and precarious situations.

Paper short abstract:

Cuban migrants’ attempts to refashion expected paths of transformation and future-making find resistance in compelling, ready-made notions of the ‘good life’. Such confrontation sheds light on the struggle between competing politics of self-fulfillment, responsibility, justice, and the commons.

Paper long abstract:

Migration is a powerful catalyst of hope in contemporary Cuba. Research among Cuban migrants in Europe and those who have recently returned to live on the island, highlights how dominant framings of migration exert an influential hold on people’s imagination, informing their mobility strategies and their efforts to become a certain kind of person and satisfy collective expectations. The presentation starts by considering how (ex)migrants are caught by and cling onto these forceful promises, and how they work on themselves and their transnational living conditions to realize them. My focus then shifts to their tentative, ambivalent attempts to refashion impracticable hopes and expectations, and to find cracks, openings, and build alliances that may enable them to formulate alternative scenarios of personal and collective transformation. I thus uncover how people draw on a multiplicity of imaginative resources and relationships to assemble and bricolage other possible futures, as well as the resistances and oppositions that stand on their way. The latter stem from powerful, ready-made notions and visions of what makes for a ‘good life’, whose differently situated, purposeful, politicized nature, and multi-scalar convergences and implications call for further exploration. I scrutinize the competing notions of self-fulfillment, responsibility, justice, and the commons that result from such conundrums and confrontations to shed light on the practical challenge and ethical dilemmas that arise when appealing scenarios of transformation become unrealizable, and the possibilities to imagine and create alternatives difficult to bring about.