Paper short abstract:

This paper explores ‘opportunity’ as a theoretical and ethnographic concept for understanding how migratory futures are imagined and pursued. Based on fieldwork in West Africa, we examine the processes of cultivating and anticipating opportunity, and how they play out in time and space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper departs from the emergence of ‘opportunity’ as a key concept in the intersection of migration theory and ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa – a region where the majority of young adults express a wish to migrate. In migration theory, the most influential attempts at incorporating contemporary barriers to mobility are founded on the separation of ‘migration aspirations’ on the one hand and ‘ability’ (Carling 2002) or ‘capabilities’ (de Haas 2011) on the other. We value this distinction but seek to challenge how aspiration and ability intersect in time, and how the two are acted upon by young Africans. Our ongoing fieldwork is based in three West African urban centres: Tema (Ghana), Serekunda (Gambia) and São Vicente (Cape Verde). We have been struck by how our interlocutors, when they reflect on the future, return to ‘opportunities,’ ‘openings’, ‘chances’ and ‘big breaks’ in life. Especially in Tema, the unpredictability of opportunities is seen to encourage a constant state of preparedness: When the opportunity to travel appears, you must be ready to grab it, so that it does not pass you by. In effect, the anticipatory dimension of opportunity constantly ‘awakens the present’ (Bryant and Knight 2020). In practice, this plays out in the cultivation and anticipation of opportunities. While migration aspirations relate to time-spaces at the scale of the world and the lifespan, the cultivation and anticipation of migration opportunities shapes life in the local time-spaces of the present. The paper is based the ERC-funded project Future Migration as Present Fact (FUMI).