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-- Annika Lems joined the Institute of Social Anthropology in 2015 to participate in the Swiss National Science Foundation's project "Transnational Biographies of Education: Young Unaccompanied Asylum Seekers and their Navigation through Shifting Social Realities in Switzerland and Turkey." Her book is strengthened by her work in this collaborative storytelling project and the extensive periods of participant observation that gave her insight into how young people navigate their ways through landscapes of extreme uncertainty and change. -- The Indiana University Worlds in Crisis series is a newly established series at IU Press and will be a hub for groundbreaking work on the causes of, experiences within, and responses to forced migration. Focusing on refugees, internally displaced people, asylum seekers and the aid system that surrounds them, the series will move beyond mere pathos to investigate the complexity of lived experiences of displacement. -- This is a strong contribution to the WIC series' focus on the everyday lives of refugees, in this case unaccompanied minors, and its aim to explore the complexity of their lived experiences of displacement, inclusion, and exclusion. -- The audience includes students and scholars studying forced migration, refugee studies, asylum seekers, refugee education, and the anthropology of education more broadly.

Intro -- Being-Here -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- PART I. Thinking What We Are Doing -- Chapter 1. Walkers of the Everyday -- PART II. Emplacement -- Chapter 2. Placing Somalia -- Chapter 3. Living One-Eyed -- Chapter 4. An Accidental Move -- Chapter 5. Home-Building -- Chapter 6. Homewards -- PART III. Displacement -- Chapter 7. At Home in the Universe -- Chapter 8. Gendered Dis/Emplacements -- Chapter 9. Displaced Stories -- Chapter 10. Placeless Dreams -- Final Juncture: Concluding Words -- Bibliography -- Index

AbstractIn this article, I take the principle underwriting Gramsci's philosophy of praxis that 'all men are philosophers', as a point of departure to interrogate the anti-cosmopolitan everyday conceptions of the world I encountered during my fieldwork in an Austrian Alpine village in the midst of the Corona pandemic. In an attempt to understand the social and political force of such vernacular reasonings, I map the contours of a critical phenomenology of common sense. Following Gramsci's lead, I reiterate that philosophical ideas uttered by the 'man and woman in the street' should be taken seriously by intellectuals. I argue that the moral and political judgements they contain do not just offer a unique basis for analysing the ways ideologies are rooted in the everyday, but also for tracing the intellectual currents underlying sedimented, exclusionary conceptions of belonging. In doing so, Gramsci's philosophy of praxis enables phenomenologically oriented anthropologists to move beyond de-historicised and romanticised depictions of the everyday whilst keeping their focus on everyday acts of meaning-making. By analysing the anti-cosmopolitan common sense ideas I came across through a Gramscian lens, I suggest that his work can form a key avenue for deciphering the social, historical and intellectual currents propelling societal change.

AbstractThis article sheds light on the socio‐cultural dynamics Merkel's open‐door policy set in motion in Austria. Based on the Anti‐Merkel discourses that came to infiltrate Austrian mainstream politics, it will show how the summer of displacements 2015 led to a pronounced move to the right. While many commentators have tended to link the post‐2015 triumph of reactionary parties to the sense of crisis caused by the few months the European Union opened its borders to asylum seekers, the article demonstrates that we need to be more careful in our analyses of the roots of exclusion. By zooming in on the everydayness of anti‐cosmopolitan practices in an Austrian mountain community, it argues that if we are to understand the current backlash against liberal and cosmopolitan ideas we need to pay attention to genealogies of exclusionary practices, or 'cultures of unwelcome'.

In this article, I take the principle underwriting Gramsci's philosophy of praxis that 'all men are philosophers', as a point of departure to interrogate the anti-cosmopolitan everyday conceptions of the world I encountered during my fieldwork in an Austrian Alpine village in the midst of the Corona pandemic. In an attempt to understand the social and political force of such vernacular reasonings, I map the contours of a critical phenomenology of common sense. Following Gramsci's lead, I reiterate that philosophical ideas uttered by the 'man and woman in the street' should be taken seriously by intellectuals. I argue that the moral and political judgements they contain do not just offer a unique basis for analysing the ways ideologies are rooted in the everyday, but also for tracing the intellectual currents underlying sedimented, exclusionary conceptions of belonging. In doing so, Gramsci's philosophy of praxis enables phenomenologically oriented anthropologists to move beyond de-historicised and romanticised depictions of the everyday whilst keeping their focus on everyday acts of meaning-making. By analysing the anti-cosmopolitan common sense ideas I came across through a Gramscian lens, I suggest that his work can form a key avenue for deciphering the social, historical and intellectual currents propelling societal change.

In this article I critically interrogate the ways researchers produce knowledge about the making and unmaking of borders. I do so by focusing on social processes of boundary-drawing that have dramatically intensified since the 2015 summer of displacements in Europe. I think through some of the methodological possibilities and conundrums that arise if we try to make visible the unarticulated social conventions underlying the everyday thresholds of belonging that determine who is permitted in, and who has to remain outside, the affective socio-political space of societies. By drawing on my own research experiences, I show why methodologies aimed at lending marginalized people a voice often fail to capture the voiceless, silent nature of these boundary-drawing practices. I suggest that in order to bring the invisible barbed wires permeating societies into the open, we need to develop phenomenologies of everyday exclusionary practices, or "cultures of unwelcome". Through my ethnographic encounters with marginalized refugee youth and individuals who believe that the influx of refugees is a threat to their values and ways of life, I argue for more nuanced research methodologies that allow us to better capture the everyday social processes underlying acts of boundary-drawing. I suggest that approaching border work as an intersubjective, worldly phenomenon involves paying attention to the experiences of individuals who find themselves pushed to the margins of society, and to those who actively participate in keeping people and groups marked as other locked out.

In this special section we rethink the role of movement and stasis in an age of globalization from an existential perspective. We suggest that this theoretical avenue is particularly well suited to move beyond the dualistic binaries that have haunted much writing on mobilities. Rather than fixating movement and stasis into two opposite poles, this perspective allows us to productively work with the overlaps and paradoxes as they appear in the everyday, thereby carving out a dialectics of im/mobility. We argue that exploring the interplay of movement and stasis has become particularly important in the current global political climate, where the mobilities of people and groups deemed troublesome are violently cut short or obstructed in ways that keep them "stuck" in continuous loops of "motion". By zooming in on the vectorial metaphors migrants and refugees seemingly stuck in immovable conditions deploy to make sense of their situations, we conceptualize both the existential orientation of migratory projects and the wider social and political coordinates impinging on these inner quests for (forward) movement and/or stillness.