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- Convenors:
-
Akin Iwilade
(University of Edinburgh)
Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju (Harvard University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Akin Iwilade
(University of Edinburgh)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Futures (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S76
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 May, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
We seek papers that investigate how the future is produced and inhabited when youth seek mobility. What systems and logics do they create to make sense of the times before they move? Do they reimagine futures in the context of such liminalities? How do these interact with state discipline?
Long Abstract:
The experiences and trajectories (physical and imaginative) of young Africans have long been entangled in notions of an outward facing, path-dependent future. In this panel, we are interested in papers that address any of three sets of questions. First, is whether the future is fundamentally youthful? What we mean here is to understand the ways the very notion of the future is central to the making of youth(ness) and how the (in)ability to appropriate visions of that future is key to how youth encounter the state. Secondly, we ask how the idea of a future place is produced in the youth imagination. What cues do youth extract meanings of the future from? Who do they listen to? And what does this mean for their mobilities? Finally, we note how the notion of the future is increasingly nested in the desire for outward mobility and yet, for most, the disciplinary systems of global (and local) mobility mean that dreams of that future are suspended, yet profoundly animate. We ask therefore for answers to how young Africans make sense of this liminality, what social systems they create in-between, when they want to, but cannot yet migrate. How are imaginaries of the future sustained in this protracted present? Does the uncertainty of anticipation open space for orientations towards alternative futures? We are particularly interested in papers that combine theoretical and empirical approaches and which draw, in particular, on innovative methodologies and cases to explain what youth do before their future arrives- or not.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 May, 2023, -Jørgen Carling (Peace Research Institute Oslo) Tone Sommerfelt (Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)) Elinor Zoë Karl (Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO))
Paper short abstract:
We asked three thousand young West Africans about their most important dream in life. The answers are analysed with innovative methods alongside ethnographic data and provide a unique opportunity for placing migration within a broader spectre of imagined futures.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper we explore the conceptual, methodological, and ethnographic potency of ‘dreams’ in the study of imagined futures and migration aspirations. The analysis is based on mixed-methods research with young adults in Tema (Ghana), Serekunda (The Gambia) and São Vicente (Cape Verde). In an early phase of the research, we were struck by how easily our Ghanaian interlocutors could talk about their dreams in life. Their accounts, and the conversations that followed, provided important context for understanding migration aspirations. Alongside continued ethnographic fieldwork, we therefore included the open question ‘What is your most important dream in life?’ in the project survey. Enumerators recorded the verbatim answers, and we developed a sensitive and multi-dimensional approach to analysing the 3000 responses. By taking a step back from a predetermined focus on migration, we are able to provide new understandings of whether and how migration features in the dreams of young West Africans. While ‘dreams’ of migration appear in titles of academic publications, and in informant quotations, they are rarely integrated in conceptual and methodological approaches. We argue that taking dreams seriously allows for more locally rooted and equitable knowledge production about migration. As an evocative and emotive concept, dreams can also enrich discussions about curtailed aspirations and the lived experience of liminality. The paper is based on the project Future Migration as Present Fact (FUMI), funded by the European Research Council (ERC).
Rodney Munemo (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
Zimbabwe’s decades of economic decline have narrowed employment opportunities for young people. African youths are presented in literature as being stuck in waithood. Despite their “invisibilisation”, Harare’s youths are active participants, deploying their agency through “Kungwavha-ngwavha”.
Paper long abstract:
Zimbabwe’s recent decades of economic decline, high records of inflation and unemployment, have narrowed formal employment opportunities for young people. The Covid-19 pandemic has also worsened the plight of young people who have not attained social markers of adulthood, such as getting a job or getting married. Considering mobility as maturation or transitioning to a desired state, African youths have been presented as being stuck in waithood. However, despite the seeming “invisibilisation” of the youths by a plethora of socio-economic factors, majority of Harare’s urban youths have reinvented transformative survival tactics through “Kungwavha-ngwavha”. Kungwavha-Ngwavha a joint of cleverness and crooking shows that urban youths in Harare are not passive recipients of their reality but active respondents displaying unique copying mechanisms. Whether it is unapproved selling of drugs, illegal food vending or foreign currency deals, the youths always find their way on the street to make a living. There is a discrepancy between legitimate means of obtaining a goal or decent living in Harare and daily youth practices. The agency of the youth at any level shows that, they are not only waiting for a better tomorrow but are active participants during the waithood periods. While the government, local authorities and churches can be viewed as structures which provide sets of rules for the youths to follow. For instance, Zimbabwe being largely a Christian nation has provisions on how young people should enter marriage, yet on the other hand marriage through elopement is a new normal.
Camille Van Deputte (Université Paris-Nanterre (France))
Paper short abstract:
At Korhogo, a secondary city in northern Ivory Coast, young men use an expression “looking for oneself”. From ethnography of practices and discourses, I show what this expression says about their position in society, the way they think their situation and how they project themselves into the future.
Paper long abstract:
This paper deals with the ordinary social experience of young men in the light of the expression, "looking for oneself". I will examine both how they define this expression and in which contexts it is used. It describes a mode of survival and a way of positioning oneself to face uncertain life’s condition. Three main matters appear: one of mobility as a response to an unsatisfactory situation, one of work in order to access to financial stability and one of subjectivity as a way to talk about their current and future positioning in relation to parents and peers. Two logic conduct someone “looking for oneself”. At an age, in a male trajectory, it is obvious that one experience such phase. It could be also a critical life event (e.g. parent’s death).
This expression resonates on a national level. It is a part of Ivorian popular culture as evidenced by its use in Zouglou music. Many songs emphasize this individual quest to find one’s place and success while not forgetting one’s family and the importance of patience. "Looking for oneself" says something about the position of these young men in their society, the way they think of themselves and how they project themselves into the future. Finally, I link my analyses with studies on Africa and the Global South which describe often youth people as "waiting", "on pause" or even "blocked". “Looking for oneself” is a way to improve one’s condition and to find a place in society, despite the uncertainty.
Oluwafunmilayo Akinpelu (The University of Alabama)
Paper short abstract:
Using the case of mass visa denial and deportation of Africans by UAE, this study will explore how the future desired by emigrating Nigerian youths is truncated by fluctuating immigration policies, a reality deflected by the collocation of migrational futurity with futurism in Africanfuturism.
Paper long abstract:
Up till 2022, Dubai was the haven, the promised land of most young Nigerians and Africans. Not only was it a thing of prestige to go to Dubai regardless of the purpose of one’s visit, but it was also relatively easy to get the needed visa. This changed when, following a series of criminal activities by Nigerians in UAE, the Middle Eastern country placed a visa ban on all citizens of Nigeria, Ghana, and 18 other African countries. Using this incident as a case study, the intention of this proposed paper presentation is to make a statement about how the hope of futurity nursed by Nigerian youths, from students and tech bros to celebrities, slay queens, and young hustling online vendors, who emigrate to Dubai and other countries of greener-grass, are truncated by harsh immigration policies birthed through the influence of subtle and overt racism, colorism, and ‘bad’ nationalism. The reality of truncated futurity experienced by Nigerian youths who are societally indoctrinated to embrace a positive outlook on outward mobility is complicated by the troubling collocation of youthful emigrational futurity with the eutopian ideal of futurism in literary sub-genres like Afro- and Africanfuturism. Nnedi Okorafor’s "Who Fears Death" is an example of a speculative fictional text that tilts toward the ideology of associating bright futures with henceforward. In the paper, the intent is to draw from the literary worldbuilding and characterization in Who Fears Death while exploring the intricacies of politically motivated botched futurities experienced by Nigerian youths.
Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju (Harvard University)
Paper short abstract:
How does Japa live an aspirational and improvisational life in the imaginaries of Nigerian youth who have not moved? How do young urban dwellers make spaces of belonging in dense cities? What orientations to movement and flight do they embody in relation to the spaces they take up in the city?
Paper long abstract:
The term japa – to run, break away, - has gained traction over the last few years in Nigerian urban youth language and popular culture to talk about the phenomenon of youth emigration. While popular discourse has primarily treated the concept in relation to mobility towards the global North, this paper turns away from the event of leaving the country and explores how it can offer a broader conceptual framework for the ways young urban residents orient to space in uncertain times and amidst economic precarity. This paper asks three related questions: How does Japa live an aspirational and improvisational life in the imaginaries of Nigerian youth who have not (will not) move(d)? Second, how do young urban dwellers make spaces of belonging in dense cities? Third, what orientations to movement and flight do they embody in relation to the spaces they take up in the city? To do this, I will do a sociolinguistic analysis of contemporary uses of “japa” in Nigerian popular culture and draw on ethnographic material from three provisional spaces of youth in Lagos: street betting shacks, street performance sites, and “pop-up” queer shops to trace how young residents inhabit shifting spaces in the city. I argue that the space making practices of young urban dwellers in these sites inhere logics of Japa that are not immediately evident in popular middle-class discourses of movement to the global North.