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This paper explores how nomadic fishermen communities in the Sahel contribute to both their host societies and their hometown by altering between 'homes' and maintaining links over distance and space. It examines their integration in both spaces through the lenses of citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how nomadic fishermen communities in the Sahel contribute to both their host societies and their hometown by altering between homes and maintaining links over distance and space. For the Kebbawa fishermen, home is conceived in the plural form. Since the 1920s, fishermen communities of the Niger river have been engaged in seasonal fishing campaigns. Leaving behind their base in North-Western Nigeria (Kebbi state), the Kebbawa fishermen communities have migrated northwards up to Timbuktu (Mali) in search for fish. When the fishing season is over, they return to Nigeria with loaded boats. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the banks and islands of the Niger river, the study provides evidence of how mobility and continuous connection with both homes contribute to local development. By contrasting the case of mobile fishermen communities to those ex-nomadic communities who settled for good and lost their ties with the place of origin, the author shows the importance of the former for the dynamic of local development. Thus, the paper examines their social integration through an examination of how people belonging to fishermen communities conceive and practice citizenship beyond their national identity.

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The disruption of migration has triggered formation of ethnically constituted 'community centers' among Darfurians in Israel. This paper will address how centers reflect continuity with homeland or social innovations and are a coping strategy within the larger social and political context.

Paper long abstract:

Some 3500 asylum seekers from Darfur, Sudan reside in Israel - many for over 10 years. They are socially and politically marginalized with no clear path to asylum and limited ability to build a future. In the absence of both the Israeli and Sudanese states, and in order to deal with this extended liminality and rupture, they have established community-based organizations including, primarily, 'community centers' which are ethnically constituted. Envisioned as representing continuity with Sudan, community centers strive to recreate a sense of home, belonging and social life in exile. Nevertheless, the significant disruption caused by the migration process and the specific Israeli context have generated innovations and new social constructions. This paper will examine these community centers through the lens of consistencies and contradictions, home and exile, continuities and disruptions and history and ingenuity and, thus, reflect a hybridity of Israel and Sudan.

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This paper wants to discuss how the use of smartphones and social media do change continuities and ruptures in the home-making processes of refugees in Kenya and Germany and what home means in a constantly multi-belonging and digitally connected state of being.

Paper long abstract:

The global distribution and appropriation of mobile phones, the internet and Social Media has had a significant impact on migration. Mobile phones and the internet are not only auxiliary tools during migration, but function as omnipresent companions and bridge the distances for people on the move. They are "migrant essentials" which create new "media cultures of migration". In contrast to the time before the digital age, these "connected" or "virtual migrants" are characterised by the fact that they carry their transnational social networks with them and through the virtual bonds create a social space of connected presence and multi-belonging (Diminescu 2008). Social Media do offer new spaces of home-making and belonging which holds especially true for people living at the margins in liminal, in-between or stuck-in spaces in displacement.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, with the example of people living in the Kakuma refugee camp in North-Western Kenya and African refugees in Trier, Germany, I want to examine how mobile phones and Social Media have changed the notion of home and belonging as well as the inherent continuities and ruptures. I want to analyse, how people on the move or in stuck-in places through engaging in transnational networking and communication enact home-making and belonging and create a home even if the host government officially rejects them. In this way, I want to show which role mobile phones and Social Media play for identity construction, future making and the creation of alternative homes in the virtual space.

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Unaccompanied children and youth at the Zimbabwean - South African borderland establish their own 'niche spaces' on South African soil and relocate their conceptual national border.

Paper long abstract:

Unaccompanied children and youth have been settling down at the Zimbabwean - South African borderland in their search for sustainable lives, as poverty, unemployment and a costly education system continue to prevent them from working towards a better future in their country. Staying at the borderland at first seems surprising. With limited business centers, unemployment, and scarce housing solutions, this border area can hardly be viewed as a center of attraction. Nevertheless, young people find rare advantages in living at the borderland and the opportunities it produces.

Children and youth face numerous challenges at the South African borderland, as some of them engage in risky lines of work with exploitative terms of employment. They are exposed to criminal activity and violence. At times they face acute poverty and they struggle to get proper medical attention. However, by staying at the borderland for a long time, they establish their own 'niche spaces' (Van Blerk, 2006), which makes their experience less migratory and more familiar. I will argue that by creating small Zimbabwean islands on South African soil, children and youth push their conceptual national border further south, relocating it after the South African border town. By creating and using continuities from Zimbabwe, I will suggest that children and youth's niche spaces become relatively Zimbabwean, which allows young people to live in South Africa with a sense of belonging on the one hand, and develop a fear of what is beyond these niche spaces on the other.

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Informed by theoretical approaches in diaspora studies, anthropology and sociology and drawing on ethnographic data and interviews, the paper seeks to illuminate the situated and processual nature of nightlife among the Zimbabwean diaspora in Britain.

Paper long abstract:

Informed by theoretical approaches in diaspora studies, anthropology and sociology and drawing on ethnographic data and interviews, the paper seeks to illuminate the situated and processual nature of nightlife among the Zimbabwean diaspora in Britain. Although there has been a remarkable intellectual, political, economic, cultural and social interest in diasporas and transnational networks and their impact on both hostlands and homelands, the investigation of the nocturnal and the nightscape as an important feature of diasporas has been neglected. Within most Western cities, nightlife has become 'normalised' as an integral part of urban life and economy. However, although branded as inclusive, open and cosmopolitan, these night-time consumer spaces are characterised by racial, ethnic, gendered and class-based exclusion. Significant interest in nightscapes tends to focus towards the hidden, illegal or even criminal activities, in this paper I want to draw attention to the nightscape as spaces in which members of African diasporas actively create, re-invent or choose because it permits them to express their identities through music, religion, rituals and work. I see the nocturnal and the nightscape not only as a space of vulnerability and victimhood but also of agency. How this agency is enacted, performed and consumed by whom and why is equally important as well as the material and social conditions which give rise to it.

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This paper examines the material and social practices Senegalese soldiers deployed to make barracks or trenches feel like home during World War I. Soldiers used these practices to reinforce or renegotiate their personal relationships in Senegal and their political positions within the French Empire.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that inhabiting military barracks and trenches led Senegalese soldiers, and their French military superiors, to renegotiate the relationship between displacement, home, and colonial political categories. World War I transformed official and popular understandings about who belonged where in the French Empire. In the unprecedented migration between West Africa and France that occurred during the war soldiers, relatives, and French officials sought to manage or take advantage of the displacement fostered by wartime recruitment. Mobilizing thousands of soldiers across Senegal and placing them into government-managed spaces made the material and moral well-being of Senegalese individuals a state priority in a way it had never been before. While many suffered immeasurably due to the coerced separation from their families and the violence of military life, some tried to use opportunities provided by military mobility to redefine their social and political positions within colonial society. Specifically, this paper examines how material practices were key to the way soldiers, their families, and French officials understood the new political and social relationships military migration produced. In barracks and trenches, the way soldiers wrote letters, cooked meals, slept on beds, wore clothes, or created prayer spaces fostered new homemaking strategies that changed notions of what material and affective well-being meant for these Senegalese soldiers, and who was responsible for supporting that well-being. These negotiations made managing displacement key to reinforcing or challenging the divisions and hierarchies of colonial society in both France and Senegal.