Immobility and crisis: rethinking migrants’ journeys through Libya to Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Marthe Achtnich
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Linear Movement ◽  
Migration Crisis

Abstract Much work on recent unauthorized migration via Libya to Europe – often framed as a migration ‘crisis’ – is focused on linear movement, isolated snapshots and points of arrival on European shores. Migrants’ experiences along their journeys and prior to arriving in Europe, important for their future mobilities, are neglected. By highlighting multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Libya and Malta, this paper calls for an analytical focus on immobilities along the journey, so as to develop a more nuanced account of the lived experiences of mobile life. Immobility retrieves situations and relations erased by linear accounts of migration. When looked at in comparative terms through the journey, immobility reveals the variegated forces that shape mobile life.

The Gift of the Godfather

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-50
Author(s):  
Monica Vasile
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Large Array ◽  
Discussion Forums ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Everyday Talk ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Internet Discussion

Based on a large array of sources, from ethnographic fieldwork to Internet discussion forums and archive surveys, this article traces complex gift-giving practices between godparents and godchildren, as they developed and thrived in the region of Transylvania, Romania, from the 1950s onward. I examine, in particular, the monetization of gifts in connection to recent turning points in economic history. Through various case studies, I show how godparenthood relates to notions of calculation, exchange, obligation, debt, care, and charity. The findings suggest a tension at the heart of godparenthood narrative and practice, a tension with many interrelated facets, between exchange and charity, between calculation and solidarity, self-interest, and care. This tension emerges in everyday talk and lived experiences of Romanians and also in broader anthropological discussions about the possibility of altruistic gift and the pitfalls of reciprocity.

Making the invisible visible? Everyday lived experiences of ‘seeing’ and categorizing children’s well-being within a Danish kindergarten

Childhood ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathrin Houmøller
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Number Of Children ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Invisible ◽  
Sense Of Urgency

This article explores how pedagogues assess and categorize children’s well-being in the everyday life of a kindergarten caring for a large number of children considered socially vulnerable. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article focuses on a newly implemented well-being assessment tool oriented towards making all children’s needs visible through the pedagogues’ regular colour-categorizations of their state of well-being. The article problematizes this ambition and proposes that some children are rendered invisible in the process of categorizing. It is argued that the categorizations are more reflective of the structural conditions of the kindergarten and a gauged sense of urgency.

scholarly journals Recording Permanence and Ephemerality in the North Quarter of Brussels: Drawing at the Intersection of Time, Space, and People

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-261
Author(s):  
Claire Bosmans ◽  
Racha Daher ◽  
Viviana D’Auria
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Transportation Systems ◽  
Spatial Transformations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The North ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Dimensions Of Space

Lying in the Senne River Valley, the North Quarter of Brussels is a physical record of spatial transformations unevenly distributed over time. Waves of developments and unfinished plans colonized its original landscape structure, erasing, writing, and re-writing it with large-scale metropolitan projects and transportation systems, around which an industrial and urban fabric developed. Accumulated expansions left an assemblage of incomplete infrastructures in which a multi-faceted and highly identifiable quarter lies punctuated by weakly defined morphological mismatches. At the center of this diverse and mutilated fabric, Maximilien Park stands as pars pro toto. From a combination of research methods that includes ethnographic fieldwork and interpretative mapping, three drawings are overlaid with the moving dimensions of space, time, and people, and assembled in a reinterpreted triptych to investigate the production of that public space. The first panel “Traces” overlaps lost urban logics and remaining traces on the urban tissue. The second panel “Cycles” traces the uneven deconstruction of the North Quarter during the last century, identifying scars of its past. The third panel “Resignifications” focuses on recent events in the area, examining how people have appropriated and transformed the park since 2015. With this triptych, the article aims to re-interpret the palimpsest of the North Quarter, represent the area’s transforming character, and unravel a spatial reading of the lived experiences of the place through time.

“Looking for One’s Life”

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sébastien Bachelet
Keyword(s):  
Mediterranean Sea ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Irregular Migrants ◽  
The Face ◽  
Transit Migration ◽  
West And Central Africa ◽  
Migration Crisis

This article examines how “irregular” migrants from West and Central Africa make sense of their trapped mobility in Morocco: for many, crossing into Europe has become almost impossible, returning to home countries “empty-handed” a shameful option, and staying very difficult in the face of repeated infringement of their rights. I explore the limits of contemporary depictions of a “migration crisis” that portray migrants south of the Mediterranean Sea as simply en route to Europe and fail to engage with (post)colonial entanglements. The article recalibrates the examinationof migrants’ lived experiences of stasis and mobility by exploring the emic notion of “adventure” among migrants “looking for their lives.” A focus on how migrants articulate their own (im)mobility further exposes and defies the pitfalls of abstract concepts such as “transit migration,” which is misleading in its implication of a fixed destination.

scholarly journals Isolation, Solitude and Social Distancing for People Who Use Drugs: An Ethnographic Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Roe ◽  
Jesse Proudfoot ◽  
Joseph Tay Wee Teck ◽  
Richard D. G. Irvine ◽  
Stan Frankland ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Substance Use ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Contact ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
People Who Use Drugs ◽  
Social Distancing ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The World ◽  
Disciplinary Perspective

COVID-19 has resulted in deepened states of crisis and vulnerability for people who use drugs throughout Europe and across the world, with social distancing measures having far-reaching implications for everyday life. Prolonged periods of isolation and solitude are acknowledged within much addiction literature as negatively impacting the experiences of those in recovery, while also causing harm to active users – many of whom depend on social contact for the purchasing and taking of substances, as well as myriad forms of support. Solitude, however, is proposed by the authors as inherent within some aspects of substance use, far from particular to the current pandemic. Certain forms of substance use engender solitary experience, even where use is predicated upon the presence of others. Adopting a cross-disciplinary perspective, this paper takes as its focus the urgent changes wrought by the pandemic upon everyday life for people who use drugs, drawing on recent ethnographic fieldwork with substance users in Scotland. Beyond the current crises, the paper proposes solitude, and by extension isolation, as an analytical framework for better apprehending lived experiences of substance use.

Trevurr: A dialogic composition on dementia, auraldiversity and companion listening

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-239
Author(s):  
Chris J. H. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Mild Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Acoustic Ecology ◽  
Common Part ◽  
Mutual Learning ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Early Stages

This article details the rationale and creative process behind a collaborative – or more accurately in this case, dialogic – sound composition undertaken as part of research into the acoustic ecologies of people in the early stages of a dementia. Changes in abilities around hearing and listening are among the first symptoms of many types of dementia, making such auditory phenotypes an increasingly common part of lived experiences of sound. Following acoustic ecology practice in doing and presenting research in sound, and more specifically Steven Feld in doing so in dialogic or polyvocal ways, co-composition can be a way of exploring the particularities of others’ hearing, listening and sound practices, which is less reliant on the discursive frames of interlocutors and researchers. The process of making sound art together draws attention to particular sounds and experiences, creating dialogic situations of companion listening, discussion and mutual learning. It also provides a framework for engaging interlocutors in soundscape and ethnographic fieldwork methods. The composition discussed here, Trevurr, documents my time working with Trevor, a keen amateur musician in Cornwall who has mild cognitive impairment, and gradually comes to simulate his experience of hyperacusis in a piece of dialogic, auraldiversity-oriented composition.

Afghan Experiences of Displacement

2018 ◽  
pp. 406-426
Author(s):  
Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Accurate Data ◽  
Internally Displaced ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Afghan Refugees ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Forced Migrants ◽  
Migration Crisis ◽  
Temporary Accommodation

This chapter focuses on research among internally displaced Afghan communities who had fled to Pakistan over the protracted periods of conflict and were then unable to return to their homes and are currently living in temporary accommodation. Drawing on interviews with forced migrants this chapter aims to explore their lived experiences. In doing so, it highlights the complexities of the decision-making processes that involuntary migrants undertake. Negative public discourses of Afghan refugees notwithstanding, they are the quintessential exemplars of a global migration crisis, given that the geopolitical situation in the region over the last three decades have compelled millions to flee their homes. In order to dispel the fears and distrust toward asylum-seekers this chapter shows the importance of producing accurate data based on the worldviews of the displaced as they are formulating their decisions to flee. This in turn enables us to challenge both the artificially constructed demonizing discourses centered on asylum-seekers as well as the refugees’ own retrospective accounts, which are sometimes at odds with their actual experiences.

scholarly journals Bordering through recalibration: Exploring the temporality of the German “Ausbildungsduldung”

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 1128-1145
Author(s):  
Kari Anne Drangsland
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Vocational Training ◽  
The State ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Past ◽  
Temporal Aspects ◽  
Temporal Dimensions ◽  
Point Of Departure

The past decades of inquiry into the “what, where, and who” of borders have more recently been followed by an interest in borders’ temporal dimensions. In this article, I contribute to this research by analyzing how border temporalities operate on the scale of the lived experiences of rejected asylum seekers in Germany. My point of departure is the so-called Ausbildungsduldung, which since 2016 has permitted the suspension of deportation for rejected asylum seekers who start vocational training. After three years of training glimmers a promised residency permit. I approach the Ausbildungsduldung as a biopolitical technique of bordering and focus on its temporal aspects. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I investigate how young Afghan asylum seekers negotiate the Ausbildungsduldung and how they can make its promised future their own. I show how the state deploys techniques of “future giving,” suspension, and deportability to produce skilled workers, and argue that the Ausbildungsduldung works as a bordering technique by producing affective attachments to a particular future trajectory, and by elevating certain ways of dealing with suspension and deportability in support of this trajectory. Showing how migrants are compelled to “wait well” while confined to a condition of deportability, the paper highlights how migrants’ experiences and practices of time become central to processes of bordering.

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