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- Convenors:
-
May Tamimova
(Czech Academy of Sciences)
Carmen GEHA (Soltara consulting)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores the extensions of political engagement among activists from the Global South who have migrated to the Global North. It aims to trace how activist lives are reconfigured through processes of displacement and racialization encountered during their immigration journeys.
Long Abstract
This panel explores the extensions of political engagement among activists from the Global South who have migrated or gone into exile in the Global North. It aims to trace how political identities and activist lives are reconfigured through processes of displacement and racialization encountered during their immigration journeys. While critical scholarship on social movements and contentious politics in the Global South has been emerging to expand our understandings of resistance rooted in historically situated experiences of repression and collective struggle, much less attention has been given to what follows when these actors leave their original sites of resistance. This panel explores how migration does not mark an endpoint in activism but opens a new, complex phase in which the meanings of resistance and political participation are renegotiated in countries of the Global North with activists’ new racialized identities within them.
This panel takes an interdisciplinary approach to answer the following questions: how do prior activist experiences translate into new political, social, and artistic forms of life abroad? How do processes of racialization shape these activists’ sense of self and possibilities for future engagement? If not, why? What knowledge is rechannelled into new forms of critique, solidarity, and creative expression, and what knowledge is left behind? And finally, how can we develop methodological tools to capture this transformation? The panel seeks to gather scholars to develop a conceptual and methodological framework for understanding the trajectories of activism from the Global South to the Global North by moving beyond narratives of rupture and loss, and instead foregrounding continuity and transformation.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper explores the afterlives of political engagement in exile through autobiography and memoir. Reading the author's trajectory alongside Masih Alinejad and Shahla Talebi, it shows how activism is suspended, reconfigured, or amplified through migration and racialization.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the uneven afterlives of political engagement among emigrants from Iran by foregrounding exile as a site of political reconfiguration rather than rupture or liberation. Drawing on the author’s autobiographical ethnographic account alongside two political memoirs—Masih Alinejad’s The Wind in My Hair (2018) and Shahla Talebi’s Ghosts of Revolution (2011)—the paper traces how political subjectivities are transformed through displacement, racialization, and differential regimes of visibility in the West.
Building on James Scott’s concept of everyday resistance and Asef Bayat’s notion of social non-movements, the paper conceptualizes political engagement beyond formal activism, centering forms of critique, presence, and embodied refusal that often remain unrecognized as political. Through a comparative reading of these three autobiographical trajectories, the paper shows how exile produces divergent political afterlives: amplified activism shaped by media visibility, ethical witnessing grounded in memory and refusal, and suspended or reactivated political engagement emerging through racialized encounters and precarity.
Frantz Fanon’s insights into embodied racialization and Saba Mahmood’s critique of liberal assumptions about agency provide the theoretical framework for understanding how political life is reshaped by exclusion, misrecognition, and uneven moral expectations placed on exiled subjects. Methodologically, the paper advances autobiography as a critical anthropological tool for capturing political lives that do not always conform to heroic or movement-centered narratives.
By centering non-heroic, fragmented political trajectories, the paper calls for an anthropology attentive to the ordinary, racialized, and often invisible continuities of resistance that persist beyond moments of mass mobilization and across borders.
Paper short abstract
This comparative research discusses the cultural, political, and social activities of highly qualified, politically engaged refugees and immigrants from Syria, Ukraine, and Turkey living in Germany. It addresses 'how prior activism translates into new political, social, and artistic forms of life.'
Paper long abstract
Political activism and participation are central to migration research. However, migrants and refugees often face barriers that restrict their political, economic, and cultural participation. Since the wars in Syria (2011) and Ukraine (2022), Germany has welcomed many highly qualified professionals, including academics, political activists, and journalists. Despite the introduction of language and orientation courses, as well as improved citizenship policies since 2024, deeper structural barriers to ‘labor market integration’ and societal-political participation persist for many.
Conversely, politically active and critical migrants and refugees from the Global South continue to engage in activism, finding alternative ways to participate in politics in the Global North. They achieve this by reorganizing and re-establishing themselves through critical networks, which comprise critical locals and transnational actors. These networks enable solidarity to be developed, collective organization to be established, and socio-political environments to be shaped. They also sustain forms of resistance and political participation, enabling these political activists to renegotiate their sense of belonging in the Global North, particularly in Germany.
This comparative research examines the cultural, political, and social activities of highly qualified refugees and immigrants from Syria, Ukraine, and Turkey who are continuing their political activism in Germany. The research aims to address the question of how prior activism translates into new political, social, and artistic forms of life in Germany, shaping the future of these political activists and positively affecting other forced migrants and refugees.
Keywords: Political activism; highly qualified activists; immigrants and refugees from Ukraine, Syria, and Turkey; the Global North; Germany.
Paper short abstract
This paper will engage with ideas of agency and resistance by drawing upon early stages of a multi-sited ethnography with women human rights defenders and activists residing in London, UK, across Germany, and in Canberra, Australia.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the extensions of political engagement among activists and women’s human rights defenders from Afghanistan who are now living in global minority countries. Drawing on early stages of multi-sited ethnographic research in London, UK, Berlin, Germany, and Canberra, Australia, this paper will explore the transnational nature of social movements and activism in ‘exile’. Activism and human rights work do not stop once a person migrates, networks continue to evolve, develop and transform. Many activists use online spheres to maintain connections and work on-the-ground, whilst simultaneously working within their countries of residency to engage in varying forms of activism – from meetings with their local Members of Parliament, to engaging with NGOs and raising awareness through films, panel events, or creative methods of poetry, art and music. Methods of engagement with activism and notions of ‘resistance in exile’ are wide-ranging, and my research found that activists tend to both keep networks on the ground in countries they left, whilst expanding and transforming their ways of working and engagement with their new countries of residencies. This paper will engage with Saba Mahmood’s conceptualisation of agency, to not be a “synonym for resistance to social norms but as a modality of action”(Mahmood 2009). Mahmood raised questions about the relationship between ‘norms’ and individuals both as they ‘perform’ in the world and how they see themselves. This paper aims to develop understandings of activism, developed beyond Western notions of direct confrontation, as activists move from the so-called global south to the ‘north’.
Paper short abstract
During the Tigray war (2020-2022; Plaut and Vaughan 2023), I documented pro-Ethiopian government and anti-government demonstrations in Europe. In this process, many find themselves becoming ‘immune’ to resistance as Ethiopian diaspora voices are 'ritualised' and transformed into ‘normality’.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on the anthropology of the state (Sharma and Gupta 2008), I propose examining anthropology as a source of resistance and solidarity in times of adversity. One crucial anthropological assumption is the tension between the universality and the particularity of anthropological themes, which helps us understand violence not as an isolated event but as part of a universally shared human condition.
During the Tigray war (2020-2022; Plaut and Vaughan 2023), I documented pro-Ethiopian government activism and demonstrations in London, as well as anti-government demonstrations, mainly by Tigrayan nationals, in four major European cities (Paris, Stockholm, Frankfurt, and Luxembourg). In this process of convergence and divergence, many find themselves becoming ‘immune’ to resistance as Ethiopian diaspora voices—traumatised by ethnic and political disputes—are ritualised and transformed into ‘normality’. In this process, activism becomes the object rather than the subject of scrutiny.
Paper short abstract
Based on nine years of visual and multimodal research with South-North/East-West migrant and refugee activists, this paper discusses opportunities and challenges of researching activism that is mostly invisible, often ephemeral, and sometimes problematic to present.
Paper long abstract
This paper aims to summarise and bring together the experiences of the project “Visualising the Invisible: Using Visual Ethnography to Explore Extra-Institutional Activism of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities”, which began at the University of Manchester and continued at ZOiS Berlin. The project focuses on the activism of migrants and members of ethnic minorities that happens outside key minority or migrant institutions and therefore remains invisible to the media and academic research. Its aim is to transcend the image of migrant/minority activism as always self-centred and instead explore, and indeed visualise, migrant activism for causes important to the broader community.
The project is as much an experiment of using different visual and sensory methods, and modalities of presentation (video documentaries, multimodal articles, multiscreen installation, public discussions), as it is a journey in exploring dynamics of (migrant) social engagement and community building; fuzzy differences between being a refugee, minority, migrant or expat; discrimination, and privilege. In this presentation, I will reflect on the experiences of working with ethnographic documentaries and installations (co)produced as part of the project, and the opportunities and challenges of sharing them within academia and with the broader public.