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This paper examines how refugee youth, who reside in countries that do not offer access to equitable labour, social, and political rights, confront the boundaries of their immobility by actively identifying strategies of hope that enable them to prepare for a future of belonging.

Paper long abstract:

Today, the majority of refugee youth are hosted in countries that neighbour their home of origin, holding liminal and precarious legal, social, and political statuses. In these countries of first asylum, refugees are often unable to access labour rights, be mobile, or gain access towards citizenship pathways. Yet, refugee youth in these countries are expected to remain in education and build their aspirations towards an 'unknowable future' (Dryden-Peterson 2017), despite being 'neither here or there' (Turner 1969, p. 69); they are unable to return home or move onto countries that offer resettlement opportunities. In this paper, I argue that refugee youths' experiences call attention to the need to move beyond ideas of being 'stuck' and 'waiting' in these forms of immobility. Drawing on a study with Syrian refugee youth in Jordan and Lebanon, I draw on notions of hope and liminality to reflect on the ways Syrian refugee youth in Jordan and Lebanon actively stretch boundaries of immobility. Reflecting on how refugee youth themselves make sense of their spaces, the findings show that refugee youth actively identify strategies that enable them to find 'belonging' within their spaces and to move forward by building their biographical narratives, constructing appropriate networks, and exploring the relevant skills that protect their sense of selfhood. The reflections of this paper highlight how refugee youths' aspirations for belonging remain absent in policies and financially-driven partnerships between the 'Global North' and 'Global South' which dictate refugees' mobility rights.

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Grounded in a ongoing mixed-methods research project, this paper engages with anthropology of hope to explore refugees' experiences of (im)mobility in Hong Kong. While practicing hope, the refugees we met make sense of immobility to envision and daily practice an existence worth living.

Paper long abstract:

With acceptance rates as low as one percent and not a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, Hong Kong is a transitional place to many refugees, but hardly one of final resettlement. While migrating through a self-branded “Asia’s world city”, refugees find themselves paradoxically stuck in it. Not entitled to work and with allowances aiming at mere subsistence, they are immobile, and it is precisely this condition that nurtures further marginalization.

Despite such a background, many refugees we met engage in daily practices of hope, which challenge the spatial-temporal dimension they are constrained in. Grounded in a mixed-methods study conducted by our research team – H.E.A.R. (Health Experience of Asylum seekers and Refugees), this paper engages with anthropology of hope to make sense of their experiences of (im)mobility.

For some refugees, hope is embodied in their children’s prospects: for instance, by taking care of their education daily, they build a different future for them, with “proper job”, a “proper house” and ultimately a proper life. For some, hope is narrowed to the strength to cope with a context of suffering, for instance by engaging in practices and relationships connecting rather than further marginalizing them. For some, hope is instead not imaginable for this life, and yet they pray for the next one. Far from being a delusion detached from reality, for some hope is a fate that keeps them away from despair. While engaging with hope, the refugees we met make sense of immobility to envision an existence worth living.

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This paper looks at waiting, being stuck, leaving and moving on, from the existential perspective of revolutionary Egyptians in a counterrevolutionary Egypt by weaving field notes with oral history interviews conducted with Egyptian revolutionaries to navigate these emotions and affective states.

Paper long abstract:

Looking at the counterrevolutionary context in Egypt, the present moment can be seen as a form of "existential stuckness," which does not necessarily coincide with a lack of social mobility, but which emerges from living within counterrevolutionary realities after experiencing a euphoric moment of hope. This paper examines waiting, hibernation, and leaving as ways of coping and recovering. Understanding the counterrevolutionary moment as a moment of waiting, this paper will look at the emotions and politics of waiting. What makes revolutionaries wait, and what do they wait for? And how are their lives affected in the meantime?

Thinking about waiting through the lens of existential mobility and of migration as temporary waiting, I will examine the act of leaving as an affective state; not only as moving away, but also as "checking out" of the revolutionary moment and attempting to move on with life outside of it. I'll look at leaving as a constant state of struggle to create a new individual and collective self, but also as a state of guilt for leaving behind an unfulfilled self.

There is no moment when one emotion ends and the other begins, but moving, waiting, and feeling stuck alternate. By exploring the intersectionality and interchangeability of these affective states, as one of my interlocutors put it: "in hoping you wait, you hibernate, you dream; life moves on and it doesn't all at once. We are stuck in the future, the present and the past"; this paper hopes to add to the already growing literature on the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution beyond the lens of political analysis.

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Researching mobility by the Polish-German border we focus on immobilities (of locals who wish no migration; transborder workers who continously wait; and of newly arrived Ukrainians who reach the border and decide not to move further) and their entanglements with our protagonists’ parallel futures.

Paper long abstract:

In our project on labour mobility in the Polish-German border region, we focus on specific sites in Brandenburg – the doughnut-shaped region around Berlin. We look at logistics centres (distributing products of Amazon, Zalando, and other corporations), Tesla-Gigafactory, fields where asparagus is grown, and other places that every day attract thousands of transborder workers from Poland every day. In our research, we come across all types of immobilities: immobility of those in Germany who wish migration did not happen; of transborder workers who spend significant parts of their lives waiting (for transport, between shifts, in transit, waiting to arrive); and also of newly arrived Ukrainian refugees who reach the Polish-German border but consciously decide not to move any further. These physical immobilities are sometimes linked to supposed social immobilities. For instance, many Polish workers work below their qualifications (yet some use the financial gains for social mobility back home).

The immobilities we observe are also linked with our protagonists’ future-making narratives and practices. Already at the early stages of our research, we clearly see the parallel, and not explicitly connected future-making narratives and practices of the different groups: local inhabitants, environmental activists from Berlin, Polish transborder workers, and Ukrainians who keep Polish border cities alive while their Polish inhabitants work, e.g. at Tesla. We explore these (parallel) futures and the different notions of (im)mobility together with our research participants to understand their understanding of the entanglements of time, space and (im)mobility.

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The contibution examines immobility as a choice among research workers. Focusing on international scholars in Japan and Latvia, I suggest that research workers and people important to them make (im)mobility decisions together, often prioritizing personal ties over potential future career advancement

Paper long abstract:

This contribution examines the tension between two contradictory factors shaping the (im)mobility of researcher workers: the demands of the dominant regimes of knowledge production and the importance of building and maintaining close relationships. At the discursive level, the “ideal” researcher is often portrayed as someone unencumbered by close personal ties and dedicating their life to science. The lived reality for many scholars, however, is quite different, as they struggle to balance their work and personal lives.

Based on semi-structured interviews with international scholars in Japan and Latvia as well as other ethnographic data, I suggest that personal considerations—relationships, kin ties, and the hope of creating them—constitute an important factor for research workers as they make decisions about their actual and potential employment locales. Rather than necessarily prioritizing the potentiality of movements to the “centers” of academic knowledge production, researchers often choose to cease the mobility expected of them by the contemporary regime of knowledge production and instead opt to remain in places significant in terms of personal ties—and places that may enable the creation of new relationships or the maintenance of already established ones. Turning the analytical lens to how mobility decisions are co-made by researchers and people close to them, opens a novel angle for examining the institutional and policy assumptions about academic mobility.

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Drawing from direct experience working at an asylum seekers’ reception centre, the paper analyses the factors contributing to turning the international protection regime into a deadlock and shows how the state strategically uses issues of waiting and immobility to keep the undesired at bay.

Paper long abstract:

Human migrations, with their role in the development of humankind and the rise and fall of civilisations, have been historically tackled through the prism of movement. However, with the growing hardening of borders worldwide, the so-called “people-on-the-move” face frequent and prolonged periods of immobilisation and deadlock, stranded several times along their journeys in no man’s lands, camps and reception centres. For this reason, recent scholarship has been increasingly stressing the “stuckedness” (Hage 2009) and forced immobility experienced by migrants illegalised by contemporary border regimes. These are equally devices of inclusion and exclusion (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013) that operate as assemblages of policies and managing practices directed at “where the migrant is” (De Genova et al. 2014). Especially those lacking a definitive legal status are made unable to move on and constantly threatened to be moved back; and, with asylum procedures stretching for years, their temporary and conditional admission becomes almost a permanent state of “enduring liminality” (Ramadan 2013). In my proposal, I draw from my experience working at an asylum seekers’ reception centre to analyse the factors contributing to this condition and show how the state strategically uses issues of waiting and immobility to keep the undesired at bay.

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This paper explores the ways in which Afghan refugee women in Delhi, India, experience everyday lives while waiting for imagined futures, via resettlement, in Canada. Bringing together social and political structures, the paper aims to shed light on the nuances of gendered refugee migration.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the everyday lives of Afghan refugee women in Delhi, India, while they wait for imagined futures in Canada. In the context of India not being signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, most refugee groups in India are considered foreigners by the Indian government and (for most purposes) come under the purview of the UNHCR. Placed in this legal liminality, Afghan refugees, who constitute one of the largest refugee groups in India, consider India as a transitory location, and are bound by the desire to be resettled in third (Western) countries. Drawing on 64 in-depth interviews conducted over nine months with Afghan refugee women of Hazara, Pashtun, and Tajik ethnicities, who migrated to India between 2005 and 2020, and who live in central Delhi as well as far-flung suburbs, I investigate how waiting in everyday life is experienced differently by different Afghan refugee women, while being in transit. I find that experiences of waiting are crucially shaped by the multiple intersections of identity that the women embody, of refugeehood, ethnicity, age, marital status, economic class, and spatial locations in Delhi, as well of those in Afghanistan. The varied identities that the women constitute produce varying experiences of everyday life in waiting, ranging from hopelessness, the perception of the UNHCR as their State, and the knowledge that Canada is only a matter of time. Bringing together social and political structures, the paper aims to shed light on the nuances of gendered refugee migration.

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This article analyzes how the proclamation of the migration crisis in the Canary Islands was used to halt the mobilities of unauthorized migrants towards continental Europe against their will, and how these undesired immobility regimes were contested from below.

Paper long abstract:

Rules and regimes of immobilization proliferate in times of proclaimed migration crises. In 2020, the unauthorized arrival of migrants was categorized as a "migration crisis", and the Spanish government, in agreement with the European Union, tried to immobilize these people in the Canary Islands, contravening the rules that allow free mobility in Spain and the Schengen area. The lack of coordination of the reception system, the deficiency of facilities and protocols, as well as the exceptional immobility measures taken during the pandemic, have had profound effects on how the mobility and immobility of these migrants have been regulated in practice. In this article, we analyze this “undesired immobilization” produced in the Canary Islands in response to an increase in the unauthorized arrival of migrants by sea from West Africa between 2018 and 2023. Analyzing this as a part of the proclaimed "migration crisis", we identify five regimes of immobility —exceptional, humanitarian, racist, bureaucratic, and carceral—that operate within a European im/mobility regime. Jointly these increase the precariousness of unauthorized migrants in connection with their origin, race, gender, religion, and social class, pushing them to greater risks in their journeys, immobilizing them in their transits, and frightening them with deportation. We also stress that this is only one part of the story. These regimes and their rules of undesired immobilization are resisted and confronted autonomously by migrants and activist allies, directly or with more subterfuge actions, trespassing the hurdles and moving forward physically and existentially, as they desire.

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Migration campaigns are implemented in West Africa to discourage youth from migrating irregularly to Europe. Using ethnographic data, this article examines how Senegalese youth react to campaign sedentary discourse to reveal their imaginaries of im/mobility and their sense of social justice.

Paper long abstract:

The EU and its member states invest in migration information campaigns to stop irregular migration from West African countries. These campaigns spread images and messages showing the suffering of migrating irregularly with the aim to immobilize so-called ‘potential migrants’ in their country of origin. As a tool of migration management, campaigns contribute to contain the mobility of Africans and to enforce border control. While studies have looked at the many actors who implement campaigns, little attention has been given to campaign receivers. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal, this article investigates how Senegalese youth, targeted as campaign audience, react to campaign messages and how these reactions reveal their imaginaries of im/mobility. We find that youth in Senegal are aware of being labelled by campaigns as ‘unwanted migrants’, yet they do not feel discouraged to abandon their migration aspirations after attending campaign events. At the same time, they apparently support the same sedentarist discourse of campaigns. Yet, their discourse does not mean to endorse a European securitization of migration, rather it intends to criticize structural constraints that make them socially immobile in Senegal. Their reactions to campaigns not only show claims for their right to move, but also claims for the right to stay put, revealing their imaginaries of (im)mobility justice and imaginaries of a different future they wish for themselves.

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Drawing on fieldwork in a Kurdish village in Iran, I discuss examples of forms of (im)mobility that help me show how the village’s landscape, shaped by its historical, social, and more-than-human surroundings, affects the subjects’ ontologies and turns mobility into a highly demanded commodity.

Paper long abstract:

In my paper, I point to the dynamics that paved the way for the creation of a landscape that has turned a Kurdish village in Iran, where I stayed for my ethnographic fieldwork (June 2021-June 2022), into a Bourdieusian field of power in which the ultimate capital is desired mobilities. The fragility of the infrastructure of the Village, i.e., transportation, telecommunications, and roads, has been conceptualized by some as illustrative of a history of de-development in Iranian Kurdistan, home to one of the most impoverished nations in Iran. I show that this fragile infrastructure is combined with, at times, immobilizing mountainous terrains and practices from the state, which I conceptualize as colonial lockdown, aimed at halting political and social mobilities of the Kurds in recent history. However, this landscape is not always immobilizing. As I show in the example of cross-border contraband commerce in the Village, the landscape paves the way for a coerced, redirected form of mobility conducive to the needs of the state and the country’s middle- and upper-level strata. I also argue that the landscape makes mobility a point of contention in the Village, as the case of a group of feminists fighting for mobility justice, among others, illustrates. The landscape of (im)mobility, striated by intersected markers of ethnicity, class, gender, and (not-a-world-system-theory) center/periphery, creates a particular mobility regime that supports some mobilities with a certain speed, affects who and what can move, and sustains power relations that afford mobilities and are partly afforded by mobilities.