Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Paolo Gaibazzi
(University of Bologna)
Giuseppe Grimaldi (University of Trieste)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Flight and migration
- Location:
- Room 1231
- Sessions:
- Friday 10 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel investigates how African migration and border management in Southern Europe reconfigure the Euro-African space, urging us to rethink relations, boundaries and categories between and within the two continents.
Long Abstract:
Both African mobility and Europe’s offshoring of borders beyond the Mediterranean Sea are reconfiguring the Euro-African space, urging us to rethink relations and boundaries between the two continents. Southern Europe, in particular, has recently experienced massive arrivals of migrants/asylum seekers from northern and especially from sub-Saharan Africa along the Mediterranean routes. These flows have transformed historical dynamics of transit and settlement of African subjects in southern European cities and agricultural enclaves. The network of facilities and measures set up to control and contain African migration has in some cases paradoxically reinforced the capillary distribution of African presence. In this sense, Arican migration and borders along the Mediterranean routes are shaping what we may call Afro-European spaces. The panel invites empirically-grounded (historical and contemporary) papers that interrogate the production of such spaces. It asks how African migration (and migration management) both sustains and transforms economic and metropolitan centres, but also especially the more marginal zones marked by fragile and in/formal economies, job and existential precariousness, mass emigration and depopulation. It equally investigates Afro-European spaces as places of potential, emerging socialites and political subjectivities between migrants and locals. In so doing, the panel seeks to stimulate reflection on the production of southern Afro-European spaces within a hierarchically ordered European space that subordinates southern peripheries at the same time that it constructs through them a unitary, bounded Europe that stands against an African Other. While seeking to go beyond a rhetoric of encounter between “Souths”, the panel looks at African migration (management) in Southern Europe as an opportunity to challenge dominant, Euro- (and Afro-) centric constructions of Europe and Africa, and explore alternative epistemologies of space and relationality. Accordingly, it welcomes contributions that talk across/beyond European and African studies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 10 June, 2022, -Chris Nshimbi (University of Pretoria)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines how African migrants perceive European borders and how social media influences the perceptions. Neglecting citizens stokes fear of migration in Europe and eliminates fear of roads to perdition—seen as roads to nirvana—and fortress Europe borders in Africa.
Paper long abstract:
The African Union and European Union (EU) hold an important relationship through the Joint Africa-EU Strategy, an emblem of a rich relationship that, nonetheless, has a troubled past and faced challenges in its evolution. Some challenges they face in the 21st century exceed the ability of either to address alone. Migration signifies such complex inter-dependencies in the relationship. This paper investigates African migrants’ perceptions of European borders and how social media influences the perceptions, in order to make sense of reports that migrants from Africa continue attempting to migrate to Europe despite border enforcement, measures by the AU and EU to improve living conditions in the migrant-sending countries and the risks and horrors involved in the migration processes. The analysis in the paper is based on a review of relevant scholarly literature that situates it in prevailing discourses on migration and borders, and primary data gathered through semi-structured face-to-face personal interviews and focus group discussions based on the snowball sampling method. The region covered in the exercise stretches from the Atlantic seaboard in West African to the Gulf of Alden and Indian Ocean coast of the Horn of Africa. While the neglect of citizens by politicians stokes fear of migration in Europe, in Africa it eliminates fear of roads to perdition—perceived to be roads to nirvana—and Europe’s fortress borders.
Timothy Raeymaekers (University of Bologna)
Paper short abstract:
Based on longitudinal research in Puglia and Basilicata (Southern Italy), this paper offers an invitation to consider migrant infrastructures as itinerant urban morphologies that re-allocate the meaning of marginality and exclusion in the interstices of contemporary capitalist modes of production.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is concerned with migrant fugitive sites as an expression of emergent Afropeanness: the liquid form of citizenship and belonging that embody the multiple borders of the Black Mediterranean. In the wake of dramatic events during the past decade, migration infrastructures have been serving the ambiguous function of mobility containment and migrant refuge. Beyond legitimate concerns around humanitarianism and border security, this ambiguity does raise a wider question about the immanent configuration of these infrastructures in terms of future urbanity/rurality and territorial citizenship – particularly if we consider their allocation in the context of historical capitalism in the Mediterranean. Adopting a deliberate infrastructural lens, the paper investigates how contemporary migrant infrastructures function both as dynamic embodiments of the boundaries between citizenship and non-citizenship and as sites of cultural negotiation on the edge of Europe and Africa. The paper – which foregrounds two contrasting examples of Afro-Italian ‘citizenship-in-action’ in Puglia and Basilicata (Southern Italy) – offers an invitation to consider migrant infrastructures as itinerant urban morphologies that re-allocate the meaning of marginality and exclusion in the interstices of contemporary capitalist modes of production.
Sarali Gintsburg (University of Navarra) Ruth Breeze (Universidad de Navarra)
Paper short abstract:
Our paper discusses how Moroccan immigrant women in rural Spain (la Ribera, Navarra) represent themselves and their lives in private and public spaces in both Spain and Morocco and how they envisage their spaces in gendered terms.
Paper long abstract:
The recent waves of migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe have given rise to an ample volume of research in various areas of research. However, such studies tend to focus on members of the active population, mainly men, and young people in full-time education, probably because of the relative ease of contacting these groups. Despite the considerable presence of women in the migrant population, they tend to be less visible and have attracted less research attention. However, this invisibility suggests that female migrants have greater difficulty accessing public spaces, and are accordingly less integrated into European societies. This problem seems to be particularly acute among women from the Muslim world, where various factors seem to hinder them from participating in the workplace and interacting with other members of the local society. In this paper we redress this balance by using data from interviews with Moroccan women living in the rural Ribera area of Navarra, Spain. The interview data were obtained in the course of a larger project dedicated to the identities and situation of Moroccan immigrant women carried out in collaboration with the Regional Government of Navarra. Our analysis proceeds from a consideration of the way these women represent themselves and their lives in space. We then approach the interview material to examine how these women presented themselves and their lives as extending over private and public spaces, in both Spain and Morocco, and how these spaces were envisaged in gendered terms. In our conclusions, we discuss the implications that these findings may have.
Viola Castellano (University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
The paper argues that the multi-scalar and diverse governmentality of the migration apparatus produces ambiguous social connections and political subjectivities, which reflect the continuous shapeshifting of borders and the geopolitical and historical contingencies that shape them.
Paper long abstract:
The paper argues that the productive, multi-scalar, and diverse governmentality of the migration apparatus, while working through mediated and abstracted social relations (Feldman, 2011), also accidentally fosters direct social connections, as the ones between asylum workers and asylum seekers in receptive facilities. These social connections weave a relational mycelium that exceeds border scripts and extend beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the mobility regime. Using mine and my main interlocutors' social connections as ethnographic objects, I describe the silences, omissions, double-binds, and awkward moments they provoked in the course of my fieldwork on "post-asylum" political subjectivities between Italy and The Gambia. In so doing, I argue that the humanitarian/securitarian nexus of the migration apparatus co-constructs not just migrant subjectivities but also non-migrant ones, reflecting broader dynamics of interconnectedness. These dynamics could be used as a litmus test to analyse the features of the current mobility regime. Their intrinsic ambiguity caused indeed in the ethnographic cases I present, what I call epistemic and ethical entrapment, the fruit of the counter-intuitive logic of the mobility regime’s functioning and simultaneously of its deep historical genealogy. The interrogation of such entrapments and "zones of awkward engagement" (Tsing, 2005) could shed light on the continuous shapeshifting of borders and of the geopolitical and historical contingencies in which they take place, while exposing the processual and unpredictable dimension of the political subjectivities reconfiguring the Euro-African space.