scholarly journals Lost in Transition to Adulthood? Illegalized Male Migrants Navigating Temporal Dispossession

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 250
Author(s):  
Louis Vuilleumier

The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has been portrayed as an invasion that threatens Europe and calls its sovereignty into question, prompting exceptional emergency responses. These (re)bordering processes highlight Europe’s uneven, discriminatory, and racialized filtering system. European nation-states sort desired and undesired migrants through sets of precarious administrative statuses that translate into limited access to resources, most notably the formal labor market. European border regimes impose specific spatialities and temporalities on migrants through long-term physical and social deceleration: territorial assignation, enduring unemployment, forced idleness, and protracted periods of waiting. These temporal ruptures interrupt individual biographies and hinder the hopes of a young population seeking a better future. However, some find ways to navigate the socio-spatial deceleration they face. In this paper, I explore how European border regimes affect the trajectory of Sub-Saharan male migrants and how they appropriate such temporal dispossession. I use biographical analysis and participant observations of a squatting organization in a Swiss city to scrutinize the everyday practices and aspirations of a population made illegal and, as a result, denied access to social markers of maturity. I investigate how time intersects with physical, social, and existential im/mobility. I argue that, in navigating spaces of asymmetrical power relationships, impoverished migrants find autonomy in illegality. Neither victimizing nor romanticizing illegalized migrants’ trajectories, this paper offers an ethnographic analysis of the capacities of an impoverished population to challenge European border regimes.

2019 ◽  
pp. 195-224
Author(s):  
Roxana Barbulescu ◽  
Irina Ciornei ◽  
Albert Varela

This chapter investigates the everyday practices of cross-border mobility of Romanian citizens in the light of the concept of ‘space-set’ (Recchi 2013 and 2015). Using mixed methods, we distinguish between stayers, movers and returnees and examine the role of frequency, reason for travel, destinations and personal significance. Findings show that Romanians’ long-term mobility, motivated especially by work, is amplified by more short-term mobility in the form of holidays, trips or visits to friends and families abroad. However, not all benefit from the rise in international mobility: two thirds of the stayers did not cross the border in the past two years. This finding suggests that first, mobile Romanians are pioneers of everyday European integration (Recchi and Favell 2009) and, second, long-term mobility has a ‘sticky’ nature and predicts short-term mobility irrespective of individual socio-economic resources. These insights counter stereotypes of Romanians, and also question what we call the ‘migratisation of mobilities’ where all forms of mobility are assimilated to a migration paradigm.


Author(s):  
Rebekah Jackson

This chapter uses observation and semi-structured interviews to explores the everyday practices, habits and routines of playworkers in an afterschool club in the northwest of England and how these help shape children’s experiences within the setting. Of key interest is the relationship between espoused playwork intentions for the design of a play environment and what happens in practice. The chapter draws on a number of interrelated concepts drawn from the field of children’s geographies that suggest spaces are not fixed containers for action or a background against which humans carry out their interactions, but are actively produced by the ongoing encounters between adults, children, materials, movements, affects, imaginations and so on. While spaces are always in the process of being produced and are open to all sorts of possibilities, they are also imbued with power relationships, and dominant forces have considerable influence in shaping the possible movements and encounters within the setting. The intention here was to pay closer attention to these entanglements and how they produce environments that might be more or less open to moments of play emerging.


Author(s):  
Alison Hope Alkon ◽  
Yuki Kato ◽  
Joshua Sbicca

From upscale restaurants to community gardens, food often reflects shifts in taste that are emblematic of gentrification. The prestige that food retail and urban agriculture can lend to a neighborhood helps to increase property values, fostering the displacement of long-term residents while shifting local culture to create new inclusions and exclusions. And yet, many activists who oppose this dynamic have found food both a powerful symbol and an important tool through which to fight against it at scales ranging from individual consumption to state and national policy. The book argues that food and gentrification are deeply entangled, and that examining food retail and food practices is critical to understanding urban development. A series of case studies, from super-gentrifying cities like New York, to oft-neglected places like Oklahoma City, show that while gentrification always has its own local flavor, there are many commonalities. In the context of displacement, food reflects power struggles between differently situated class and ethnoracial groups. Through the lens of food, we can see that who has a right to the gentrifying city is not just about housing, but also includes the everyday practices of living, working and eating in the places we call home.


From upscale restaurants to community gardens, food often reflects shifts in taste that are emblematic of gentrification. The prestige that food retail and urban agriculture can lend to a neighborhood helps to increase property values, fostering the displacement of long-term residents while shifting local culture to create new inclusions and exclusions. And yet, many activists who oppose this dynamic have found food both a powerful symbol and an important tool through which to fight against it at scales ranging from individual consumption to state and national policy. The book argues that food and gentrification are deeply entangled, and that examining food retail and food practices is critical to understanding urban development. A series of case studies, from super-gentrifying cities like New York, to oft-neglected places like Oklahoma City, show that while gentrification always has its own local flavor, there are many commonalities. In the context of displacement, food reflects power struggles between differently situated class and ethnoracial groups. Through the lens of food, we can see that who has a right to the gentrifying city is not just about housing, but also includes the everyday practices of living, working, and eating in the places we call home.


KWALON ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlies Maaijen ◽  
Annemiek Stoopendaal

Actor Network Theory: philosophy and research method applied in research about best practices in long-term care Actor Network Theory: philosophy and research method applied in research about best practices in long-term care This article describes the methodological consequences of using Actor Network Theory in the authors’ research which aimed to study the acting of best practices in long-term care practices. Doing ANT analysis requires the understanding of ANT key concepts which draw on an alternative ontology about reality and sociological acting. The unit of analysis of ANT focuses upon interactions between actors (human and non-human). The analysis traces and reconstructs interaction processes. ANT requires in-depth research which can be achieved by document analysis, interviews and observations. In addition it is recommended by the authors to investigate time in getting to know the everyday practices, habits and frequently used devices at the research site.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Soler

This article demonstrates the dynamic relationship between long-term ethnicized silences, family secrets and nation-building in Central and Eastern Europe. How have modern nation-states been imagined and formed on the basis of these long-term silences? In order to illustrate what we believe could be the contribution to anthropology (principally to nationalism studies) enabled by introducing this analytical category of silences, in this research we will focus on a close analysis of the life story and identity journey of a self-identified “Slovak woman with Hungarian-Roma roots” who settled in the Czech Republic in 2009. Through this ethnographic example, and in an attempt to go beyond particularities, some of the themes covered are: what meanings, uses and processes of silences can we find in Slovakia, and what is their relationship to the construction of minorities and to an ethno-cultural model of nation-building (an imagined community)? In which domains and under which power relationships have long-term silences and hidden family secrets prevailed in everyday life? To what extent have those silence frameworks been negotiated and used as intergenerational strategies of family unity and protection? And finally, within the context of migration and the complex processes of Europeanization and globalization, how have those long-term, in this case “shamed”, ethnicized Roma silences been contested and broken, and what is the meaning of this development (at micro and macro levels)? In other words, for nation-states that have long been imagined on the principle of ethno-cultural homogeneity, I ask what can long-term ethnicized silences tell us about the process of nation-building (from the bottom up) and the quality of our EU democracies? Where do we come from, where are we now and, at least in terms of a warning (due to the rise of xenophobic forms of populism and radical nationalism), where are we going?


Author(s):  
Boubacar Diallo ◽  
Fulbert Tchana Tchana ◽  
Albert G. Zeufack

Author(s):  
David M. Lewis

This chapter looks at the concept of freedom and its articulation in ancient Greek texts. It shows that in the Homeric period, the terminology of slavery and freedom was used only for personal status. In the centuries that followed, these terms were appropriated and applied metaphorically to a variety of asymmetrical power relationships. However, Greeks were able to maintain clear distinctions between slavery as a legal concept and slavery as a metaphor. The chapter concludes with critiques of the methods of M. I. Finley and R. Zelnick-Abramovitz, who do not make clear distinctions between law and metaphor when analysing this terminology, and whose methods have led to convoluted analyses of aspects of Greek slavery.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey L Dunoff ◽  
Mark A Pollack

This chapter discusses the inner working of ICs, such as the drafting of judicial opinions; practices concerning separate opinions; the role of language and translation; and the roles of third parties. It also presents a preliminary effort to identify and examine the everyday practices of international judges. In undertaking this task, the authors draw selectively upon a large literature on ‘practice theory’ that has only rarely been applied to international law in general or to international courts in particular. A typology and synoptic overview of practices is presented.


Author(s):  
Mariya Stoilova ◽  
Sonia Livingstone ◽  
Giovanna Mascheroni

Mobile devices play a growing role in the everyday lives of children around the world, prompting important questions about their effects on childhood experiences. Exploring the recent global trends in children’s use of smartphone devices, the authors examine the reconfiguring of children’s communicative practices and cultures of connectivity, documenting the opportunities and risks that smartphone technology affords. Throughout the chapter the authors challenge the notion of “digital childhoods,” drawing on the most reliable research on children and smartphones including findings from Global Kids Online, which suggest that digital divides intersect with existing social inequalities, exacerbating the barriers for less privileged children. This raises further questions about the long-term consequences for children’s development, rights, and future access to opportunities and resources.


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