Etikettarkiv: migration

Thesis defence: Aida Jobarteh. Routes and Ruptures of the Mediterranean Backway: An ethnography of Gambian men navigating the European border regime (2025)

Aida Jobarteh defends her thesis in Ethnology ”Routes and Ruptures of the Mediterranean Backway. An ethnography of Gambian men navigating the European border regime” at Stockholm University.

The defence will be held May 28 2025, 10:00 at hörsal 3, hus 2, Campus Albano, Albanovägen 20, Stockholm, and will also be available via Zoom (in english). The opponent is Marie Sandberg (Associate professor in ethnology at the University of Copenhagen).

Read more here.

The thesis can be found open access in DiVA

Abstract:

This thesis examines how Gambian men navigate and assert themselves within the political economy of borders through their migration to Europe. By centering their lived experiences, I analyze how they negotiate, respond to, and resist borders along the Mediterranean Backway, with a particular focus on their arrival and continued pathways in Italy. The study highlights various vantage points along the participants’ migration trajectories – from their departure from the Gambia and transit through Libya to their interactions with Italian state institutions. Particular attention is given to their encounters with the migration and asylum system, the labor market, and the asylum accommodation system in Italy.

Drawing on critical border studies, critical phenomenology, theories of Black masculinity, and racial capitalism, this study interrogates the European border regime from the perspective of those navigating Its’s margins. The concept of border tactics works as an analytical tool to explore how control over mobility manifests in the participants’ everyday lives. These tactics are conceptualized as reactive measures employed by states in response to migratory movements. The central border tactics identified in this thesis are containment, categorization, formal abandonment, and temporal control.

Methodologically, the research draws on ethnographic engagements with eight core participants and nine occasional participants over a period of five to six years. This has involved interviews, conversations, participant observations, video documentation, and collaborative, participant-driven methods conducted across five Italian cities. Grounded in an ethnological and decolonial tradition, the research has been guided by participatory methods that center the co-construction of knowledge between the research participants and the researcher, centering the participants’ own narratives and experiences of migration.

The thesis studies the participants’ use of vernacular concepts in their narratives of the Mediterranean Backway, such as the Babylon system, napse, just sitting, and semester. These expressions become anchor points in the analysis to understand how they navigate various border tactics. In doing so, the analysis situates the European border regime within enduring structures of coloniality, racial hierarchies, and capitalist exploitation, highlighting the production of a racialized, exploitable labor pool of migrant workers. By centering understandings of migration, mobility, and border control from the margins, this study challenges Eurocentric knowledge production and foregrounds alternative knowledge of borders and movement drawn from participants’ own narratives. The thesis contributes to an interrogation of the profitability of borders – how borders actively shape the political economy of migration.

Health in Negotiation : Cultural Analytical Perspectives on Health and Inequalities in the Swedish Asylum Context (2024)

Talieh Mirsalehi will defend the thesis in ethnology at Lund University Health in Negotiation: Cultural Analytical Perspectives on Health and Inequalities in the Swedish Asylum Context on 24 May 2024. Opponent is Jenny Gunnarsson Payne.

The thesis can be found here.

Summary:

Health inequalities are a persistent and growing issue in different countries worldwide. Sweden, despite being one of the scandinavian countries with internationally recognized welfare system is no exception. The issue of health disparities and its increase among some groups, including those who are categorised as migrant have been acknowledged. Emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, revealed the gravity of the situation when groups of people who had migrated to Sweden from countries mainly within Africa and the Middle East were on the frontline experiencing disproportionate impacts of the Coronavirus. Although the effect of structural factors on health vulnerabilities among these groups have been identified, there is still little knowledge about how individuals who are placed into migrant categories have experienced and responded to health risks caused by the pandemic. This dissertation aims to provide a cultural analytical account of the ways in which people who undergo an asylum process in Sweden relate to, navigate, and negotiate health. By empirically investigating a group of asylum seekers’ perceptions of health, body, and risk, this study demonstrates how the participants make meaning of their embodied experiences of generating health and practicing self-care while living in a transitional state. In a health care landscape where taking responsibility for one’s health is a sociocultural norm, protecting health and preserving body is seen as a moral percept, expected from all members of society. Disparities in health, from this view, may be perceived as avoidable by leading a healthy way of life and avoiding exposure to health risks. By focusing on a group of asylum seekers’ experiences of navigating health and care before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden, this study reveals how perceptions and practices of health and care are situational, contextual, and negotiable in relation to the conditions within asylum processes. While being expected to actively participate in the society they want to be a part of, those who joined this study revealed how uncertainties about the state of their ‘at-risk’ bodies clash with performances of membership.While making meaning of notions of health and care in the new society and turning it to projects of familiarization, those who joined this study shared challenges of building a fit and equally immune body that matches new parameters of health and well-being under unqual circumstances. However, it may not be translated as passivity and lack of initiation among ‘vulnerable’ groups when it comes to generating health. The notions of health, care, risk, and immunity, from this perspective, are boundary concepts and open to interpretation. In order to access the experiences, perceptions and practices of health among ‘inaccessible’ migrant populations, more emphasis needs to be put on methodological considerations in health research among different groups.

Várdduo seminar with Kenna Sim

When? Tuesday 22 August, 2023 at 13:30 – 15:00
Where? Fatmomakke floor 4 NBET / Zoom

Welcome to a Várdduo seminar with Kenna Sim

Movement is Foundational: Indigenous Perspectives on Climate Mobilities
Kenna Sim, PhD at LiU

Migration and movement, including displacement, planned resettlement, and immobility, are often identified as one of the largest future impacts of climate change. In mainstream climate adaptation frameworks, climate migration is commonly perceived as a contemporary phenomenon that is severed from historical, political, social, and economic contexts, including ongoing processes of racial capitalism and colonial dispossession. Further, it has only recently been acknowledged in mainstream research on migration, resettlement, and climate change that Indigenous peoples have long-standing traditions of mobility and movement that differ from common understandings of migration.

All interested are welcome to participate!
The seminar will be held both on site in Fatmomakke NBET level 4 and on Zoom. Those who want to participate via zoom register here, link will be sent out the day before the seminar.

Rurala stannare : En studie av stannandets dynamik i Österbotten, Finland (2023)

Rurala stannare : En studie av stannandets dynamik i Österbotten, Finland är skriven av Kenneth Nordberg, Karin Sandell och Magnus Enlund.

Att stanna på landsbygden har ansetts vara någonting passivt, i motsats till att flytta därifrån, som setts som en aktiv och mer intressant handling att studera. Den här boken belyser stannandet som en dynamisk och mycket medveten process och ger på så sätt ett nytt perspektiv på landsbygdens utveckling. Att stanna på landsbygden är en aktiv handling genomförd av människor som ofta har alternativ, där vissa faktorer avgör till stannandets fördel.

Boken omfattar fem fallstudier i österbottniska byar med målsättningen att dra mer generella slutsatser om stannade på landsbygden. Studien tar avstamp i en historisk exposé av byarna för att senare analysera de faktorer som varit avgörande för stannande under de senaste årtiondena. De här faktorerna kan ha att göra med platsens kvaliteter, som en vacker natur, tillgång till service och arbetstillfällen, eller en stark gemenskap och sociala sammanhang. Ytterligare en viktig dimension är att människors hembygdskänsla föder en strävan att göra det möjligt att stanna, något som vi ser ett flertal exempel på i bokens fallstudier.

Boken kan hittas här.

Public lecture: Migrantour – Intercultural urban routes

Migrantour – Intercultural urban routes
Speaker: Nadine T. Fernandez

Dear all,
We are delighted to invite you to a public lecture with professor Nadine T. Fernandez.

Date: Tuesday 17 May 2022
Time: 10-12 am
Location: Hörsal (Lecture hall) 11, house F, Södra husen, Campus Frescati,
Stockholm, Sweden

This is a public event so please feel free to share this invitation widely.

Nadine T. Fernandez is a professor in Cultural Anthropology at State University of New York, Empire State College. Her research investigates gender, race, sexuality and couple relationships in relation to transnational mobility, tourism and national migration policy. The book Revolutionizing Romance (2010) analyzes younger ”interracial couples” in 1990s post-Soviet Cuba. Intimate Mobilities: Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World (2018), which Fernandez co-edited with Christian Groes (Roskilde University, Denmark), deals with transnational mobility and couple relationships across national borders. Fernandez’s own contribution to the book is about Cuban men in Scandinavia. She is involved in a European project at the intersection of migration, heritage and tourism, called Migrantours. And she is also working on a book project on gender in a global perspective, how gender and gender issues must be contextualized and understood in relation to specific places.

More information about Migrantours: http://www.mygrantour.org/en/

Kind regards,

Magnus Öhlander