Paper short abstract:

Crises shape the response of migrants in impulsive cooperation answers, often leading to the temporary or permanent return to their home-countries. Social media becomes a leading instrument by providing people with close examples of successful return stories.

Paper long abstract:

Often seen as the ultimate goal of blue-collared migrants, returning to the home country becomes during times of international crises the only feasible action. This paper seeks to understand the reasoning behind the return responses in Romanian migrants in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic and the energetic crisis arose in 2022. It will use participant observation, semi-coordinated interviews, and text analysis to integrate Romanian migrants’ reactions into the broader perspective of crisis response management. People either choose to relocate temporarily to Romania to be close to their families, frequently leaving better-paid employment in Germany, or they are obliged to return after being fired from their jobs. Many of them maintain a close connection to their homes through the constant use of social media, which is also one of the reasons behind leaving their destination country in a risky situation. Facebook groups regularly disseminate populist agenda, fake news, or threads questioning belonging, which makes migrants more prone to selecting the return path. Digital fields become the connecting point between migrants and their home countries. They are constantly watching the news, talking to their families, presenting their issues, and searching for responses to various problems via social media. On this channel, they even try bringing a part of their homes to Germany by ordering traditional food or participating in events organised by Romanian associations. Thus, even for people who do not choose reverse migration during the crisis, practising a form of digital migration helps them cope with the effects of the event.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on how mobility indeterminacy on the roads in the declining ex-Gulag Kolyma area, in North-Eastern Russia, brought about a grass-roots rescue infrastructure, particularly emergency rescue pickets, and thus provided a condition for the creation of value.

Paper long abstract:

Kolyma is a notorious ex-Gulag region in the North East of Russia, one of the world's coldest places. Since the USSR collapse, the region has experienced massive depopulation and the closure of dozens of small industrial towns. For the dwellers of the remaining settlements, this has resulted in vast empty areas of hundreds of kilometers without Internet or mobile connection (and timely aid in case of accidents) on the long and dangerous way to the regional capital Magadan. In my paper, based on recent fieldwork in the region, I will focus on how mobility indeterminacy on the Kolyma roads brought to life a grass-roots rescue infrastructure, which includes unique "emergency rescue pickets", satellite and mobile phones, and people passing by the road. It also includes road ethics and preparatory practices for travel, especially in winter. I will mainly concentrate on a case of a costly invention of emergency rescue pickets by a Magadan entrepreneur made possible due to the importance of indeterminacy for Kolyma's mobility. By doing that, I demonstrate how indeterminacy provides a condition for value creation (cf. Alexander, Sanchez 2018).

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will explore the uncertainties in regular migration. I will focus on the ways in which Turkish migrant doctors and their family members deal with the social, emotional, and economic implications of uncertainty in the course of their migrations to contemporary Germany.

Paper long abstract:

For many Turkish doctors, who recently came through EU Blue Card programme to Germany, life seems to be fraught with uncertainties. They share the experience that the programme does not always and straightforwardly deliver on its promises. They share the uncertainties of their privileged mobility: they have discovered that even after having been granted a visa, they may face the threat of enforced return to Turkey in case that their application for approbation is denied, or they fail the medical German examination (Fachsprachprüfung), or their temporary medical license (Berufserlaubnis) cannot be issued or must be withdrawn on a variety of grounds. It is also not uncommon that their families are forced to wait in uncertainty for many months for family reunification. Uncertainty can be felt at the beginning of migration as an exceptional situation but the longer it lasts, the greater the chance that it will become part of everyday life, where even simple quotidian decisions must be carefully considered. Uncertainty may appear in different forms and it is an individually and collectively different experience. Uncertainties that regular migrants experience have received less attention in anthropological literature on migration. In this presentation, I will demonstrate the ways in which Turkish migrant doctors and their family members deal with the social, emotional, and economic implications of uncertainty in the course of their migrations to Germany.

Paper short abstract:

The relative well-defined concept of HOME becomes fluid in the context of uncertainties and mobilities. In my paper I will discuss the practices and aspirations of ethnic Roma who are engaged in international migration. Their Home is flexible, site of belonging but also that of vulnerabilities.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of Home is something that is easy and in the same time difficult to define. Nevertheless, for many people building a Home or losing a Home is in the center of their life-projects. This is the case of the often marginalized Roma minority, who recently engage in international migration, many of them with the aspiration to build a better home for their children. Their mobility had visible effects in the local physical and social space. Their new constructions changed the landscape of the localities. These changes in their turn affected the local social relations with the local majority population.

But these continuously transformative mobilities (or effects of it) are in contrast with the aspiration of the Roma persons and families who move to be at Home. For them, Home means belonging (or attempt to belong) to larger or smaller communities that can be achieved either through their presence (they come home) or even absence (they only build the house and go back abroad). In both cases, the material expression of belonging is important because it is situated in the present and is a reference point for the future seeded in the past.

I will bring ethnographic examples coming from long-term fieldwork in Roma communities and more recently from the HOMInG ERC project (Univ. of Trento).

Paper short abstract:

Our discussion shows how talk about the migration crisis serves as a framing mechanism to produce uncertainty and naturalize anti-migration policies within the borders of the EU but simultaneously create opportunities for migrants and other actors involved in emergent moments of continuous mobility.

Paper long abstract:

The EU and the Spanish government immobilized a few thousand West Africans in dehumanizing conditions for months, between 2020 and 2021, in the Canary Islands, as a part of the European hotspot system. Our discussion shows how talk about the migration crisis serves as a framing mechanism to produce uncertainty and naturalize anti-migration policies within the borders of the EU – externalization, militarization, deportation– but simultaneously create opportunities for migrants and other actors involved in emergent moments of continuous mobility processes. We analyze these formal and informal opportunities produced by the proclamation of a migration crisis in the Canaries, as well as stress the migration myths that facilitate the proclamation of the crisis. Locally, various informal strategies may be used based on different speculations to resist the immobilization of migrants and emphasize migration as a part of life in the Canaries, with its long history of migration. The capacity to speculate about opportunities and cope with uncertainty is thus a needed skill of every actor in any migration crisis.

Paper short abstract:

Based on long-term ethnographic research along the Balkan migratory trail, we discuss how the railway, as a mobility structure shaped by the ideology of progress, coordination and certainty, is simultaneously used and reshaped in the context of uncertainty of clandestine migration.

Paper long abstract:

As a product of modernity, the railway is a mobility (infra)structure shaped by the ideology of progress, coordination and certainty (Beaumont and Freeman 2007). In this presentation, we ask how this structure works in the context of uncertainty. We are interested in the interactions of prolonged and repeated situations of uncertainty related to clandestine or irregularized migration, on the one side, with the railway, on the other. Our main question is how railways are utilized for both containing and enabling mobilities towards the EU. Based on long-term ethnographic research along the Balkan migratory trail, we discuss how railways are used by clandestine migrants for facilitating movement (as leads, resting infrastructures, etc.), and how they are used by state authorities to hinder and revert this movement (as detention, backward-paths, etc). We examine the relation of tragic events and border deaths associated with railway-use in the context of irregularized migration with changes in migration practices and discourses. The use of railways to prevent unwanted movement toward the EU has also resulted in physical changes of railway infrastructure. We investigate how the usages of active/abandoned railways inform and reshape everyday geographies of movement along the route, intercity mobility and life on the EU administrative border.

By focusing on the entanglements of railway and clandestine migration, this presentation seeks to illustrate how uncertainty operates on the move, unpacking the way train infrastructure spatially interfaces mobile bodies with the potentials and foreclosures of crossing borders, contributing to a non-linear understanding of migration.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine the links between mobility and uncertainty from the touristic, German-speaking, Swiss Alps, through the experience of migrant workers. I propose a reflection on the various scales and manifestations of uncertainty – contextual, structural, existential – in global tourism.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decades, a succession or acceleration of crises have created a global sense of instability (Eriksen 2016). Yet, modern societies are structurally uncertain as they are required to constantly reinvent themselves, particularly in the processes of creative-destruction that drive capitalism (Harvey 1989). Mobility is deeply tied to these contextual and structural forms of uncertainty: globally, people often move from contexts of instability to places of normality or security. In this paper, I examine the links between mobility and uncertainty from the touristic, German-speaking, Swiss Alps, as an attractive destination for tourists but also migrant workers, who seek to secure their futures in one of Europe’s wealthiest countries. I discuss how crises – humanitarian, financial, etc. – drive people to physically move to be existentially mobile (Hage 2009), while the difference they represent in “host” societies is put to work in a capitalist, touristic economy (exemplified in the outsourcing of hospitality labor to migrants). While some migrants manage to restore a sense of stability thanks to their new lives in Switzerland, I show how tourism labor creates new forms of instability and precarity for many. This existential uncertainty is however part of a global economy of tourism that is uncertain in itself, as an industry based on acceleration and innovation, as well as the fleeting mobility and unmanageable wanderlust of tourists. I propose a reflection on the various scales and manifestations of uncertainty – contextual, structural, existential – and their relationships to uneven forms of mobility.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic work among international scholars in Latvia, I examine the uncertainties embedded in the work and personal lives of transnationally mobile research workers, especially in research contexts that tend to be considered marginal.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I highlight and examine the uncertainties embedded in the work and personal lives of transnationally mobile research workers. All over the world, the dominant regimes of knowledge production increasingly prioritize short-term employment contracts, with the expectation that the “ideal” researcher would be ready for and even enthusiastic about movements across borders from one position to another. At the same time, the lived reality for many scholars is quite different, as they attempt to balance various aspects of their lives in the face of the multitude of uncertainties engendered by the contemporary regimes of knowledge production.

Based on semi-structured interviews with international scholars in Latvia as well as other ethnographic data, I examine how this kind of uncertainty is experienced by transnationally mobile scholars in research contexts that tend to be considered marginal. As one such locale, the Latvian research landscape is characterized by the unpredictability of research careers as well as the lack of funding and fierce competition for the available resources. How, then, do international scholars in the country make sense of their work and personal lives there—and how do they envision their future? I suggest that, while international scholars may arrive in Latvia with the hope of gaining a measure of certainty in their lives, the country’s research system compounds the already prevalent sense of uncertainty and pushes the researchers out in search of certainty elsewhere.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the affective geographies of people in street homelessness in the city of Zagreb, and the interrelations between homeless individuals emotional experiences and their use of places and trajectories/mobilities trough the city.

Paper long abstract:

Research has addressed the socio-spatial exclusion of homeless people from public spaces in European cities and showed how the increased control of public spaces, including increased policing and regulation/criminalization, is often used to manage people in homelessness and restrict their movement through the city (Doherty et al., 2008). Despite this, the lives of homeless people are often characterized by high levels of mobility and they often tactically

use space and move through the city to negotiate different containments (Jackson, 2012). Recently, the authors gave attention to the interplay between emotional dynamics and place while understanding the experiences of homelessness and exclusion (Cloke et al., 2008; Fahnøe, 2018). This paper builds on this work and addresses the affective geographies of people in street homelessness in the city of Zagreb, and the interrelations between homeless individuals

emotional experiences and their use of places and trajectories/mobilities trough the city. By focusing on the emotional experiences of places this paper aims to shed a different light on the practices and mobilities of homeless people, which can contribute to more nuanced understandings of the processes of socio-spatial exclusion in the city and help to create more adequate interventions.

It is based on qualitative materials gathered from the CSRP project Exploring Homelessness and Pathways to Social Inclusion: A Comparative Study of Contexts and Challenges in Swiss and Croatian Cities (No. IZHRZO_180631/1), and it draws on ethnographic fieldwork, in depth and walk-along interviews conducted with people who have been experiencing street homelessness in Zagreb.

Paper short abstract:

From the perspective of West Africans, any migratory journey to Europe is inherently uncertain. I explore the interpretation of that uncertainty, which in the Gambia and Guinea-Bissa stems from particular, Islamic, views on human destiny, ‘luck’, and the intervening cosmological power of witchcraft.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I analyse the interpretation of uncertainty and contingency of the migratory journey to Europe, which in the Gambia and Guinea-Bissau stems from particular views on human destiny, ‘luck’, and the intervening cosmological powers of witchcraft and sorcery. The notion of ‘luck’ is understood as an inherent element of Islamic destiny, which is pre-determined but contingent, shaped with constructive human effort but also affected by envious others: through witchcraft and sorcery. Such an understanding of human fate leads to particular attitudes to the undertaking of migration – whether documented or clandestine – hope and optimism on the one hand, fear, suspicion and secrecy on the other. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis contributes to recent discussions in anthropology on destiny and uncertainty, and on contemporary African migrations, exploring the ways in which people manage contingency and unpredictability of migration to the Global North.