Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on transnational mobility between Europe and Western Africa, with particular focus on Moroccan men, who arrived in Spain as irregular migrants in the 1990s and on the new European nomads ("housetruckers") who engage in a mobile life between Europe, Morocco and other parts of Western Africa.

Paper long abstract:

The global economic recession beginning in 2008, together with increasingly restrictive migration and border policy in the EU, have had far-reaching consequences to the patterns and the cultural logic of transnational mobility Between Europe and Western Africa. It has become increasingly difficult to conseptualise some of these the newly emergent mobile lifestyles in the conventional analytic terminology of migration and mobility studies. Our aim is to demonstrate this by offering ethnographic insights into the transnational movement of popular class (sha´bi) Moroccan men, who arrived in Spain as irregular migrants in the 1990s, and new European nomads who engage in a mobile life between Europe, Morocco and other parts of Western Africa. The subjects described in this paper create distinctively fleeting trans- and multi-national attachements that are played out during "temporary rests". Both the Moroccans with EU passports and the Westerners engage in a shared lifestyle on the road and exchange experience, information and solidarity. These mobile lifestyles arise out of global modernity which promotes, enables and generates an escape to an alternative modus vivendi and experimentation with new communal relations.