Suchergebnisse

Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part I: Navigations -- Chapter 1. Worlding Departures -- Chapter 2. Moving through Affective Circuits -- Chapter 3. Navigating Webs of Facilitation/Control -- Chapter 4. 'The System' -- Part II: Re-viewing Europe -- Chapter 5. In Place/Out of Place -- Chapter 6. The Multiple -- Conclusion -- Glossary -- References -- Index --

"Studying the im/mobility trajectories of West Africans in the EU, this book presents a new approach to West African migrants in Europe. It argues that a migration lens is not necessarily the best starting point to understand these dynamic im/mobility processes. Rather than seeing migrancy as the primary marker of their lives, this book positions these trajectories in a wider social script of mobility and discusses how African migrants are confronted with rigid mobility regimes, but also how they manage to transgress and circumvent them"--

AbstractEuropean migration scholars are increasingly interested in people's onward migrations and secondary movements. This paper takes a critical look at the conceptual underpinnings of this subfield by indicating how the lexicon of onward migration frames migratory processes as a staged process, involving a South–North directionality and hinting at a gradual progress for the migrants in question. This "grand narrative" of onward migration is anchored and reproduced by EU's overarching policy frameworks. Based on an ethnographic project that followed African trajectories inside Europe, I present some dynamic im/mobility trajectories that can be considered counter narratives of onward migration. The detailed outlining of these trajectories show how mobility itself is a shifting ground without one major vector directing the movements. These counter narratives result in a discussion on the migranticization of mobility. More specifically, I plea for research approaches that free migratory movements from prepossessed directions.

Sub-Saharan African migration towards the European Union (EU) belongs to one of the most stigmatized forms of migration of the 21st century. It is strongly characterized by EU's restrictive migration policies. As a consequence, migrants who are aspiring to reach the EU often undertake fragmented and dangerous journeys to the North. This contribution attempts to gain more empirical insights into these migratory journeys. It is based on a 'trajectory ethnography' that combines in-depth interviews with sub-Saharan Africans, who are waiting in Morocco and Turkey to enter the EU, with a longitudinal strategy to follow some of these respondents over longer periods of time. With this longitudinal element I was in particular able to grasp expected steps and unexpected turns in individual migration trajectories. By discussing three main components (the motivation, facilitation and velocity) of journeys, this contribution puts into perspective the unidirectional and often frictionless metaphors of migration—as if migrants move like 'flows' and 'waves'.

This thematic issue is a collection of articles reflecting on methods as border devices of hierarchical inclusion spanning migration, mobility and border studies. It maps some key concerns and responses emerging from what we call academic backstages of migration, mobility and border research by younger academics. These concerns are around (dis)entangling positions beyond Us/Them (i.e. researcher/researched), delinking from the spectacle of migration and deviating from the categories of migration apparatuses. While these concerns are not new in themselves the articles however situate these broader concerns shaping migration, mobility and border studies within specific contexts, dilemmas, choices, doubts, tactics and unresolved paradoxes of doing fieldwork. The aim of this thematic issue is not to prescribe "best methods" but in fact to make space for un-masking practices of methods as unfinished processes that are politically and ethically charged, while nevertheless shedding light in (re)new(ed) directions urgent for migration, mobility and border studies. Such an ambition is inevitably partial and situated, rather than comprehensive and all-encompassing. The majority of the contributions then enact and suggest different modes of reflexivity, ranging from reflexive inversion, critical complicity, collective self-inquiry, and reflexive ethnography of emotions, while other contributions elaborate shifts in research questions and processes based on failures, and doubts emerging during fieldwork. We invite the readers to then read the contributions against one another as a practice of attuning to what we call a 'cacophony of academic backstages,' or in other words, to the ways in which methods are never settled while calling attention to the politics of knowledge production unfolding in everyday fieldwork practices.