Following the financial and economic crisis, welfare policies across the EU are increasingly becoming instruments for limiting the mobility of certain EU migrants. In this article, we focus on EU citizens who see their freedom of movement in the EU being restricted after they have applied for social assistance or unemployment benefits in their country of residence. Doing so, we conceptualize undocumented EU migration by means of the concepts of ‘non-deportability’, ‘deservingness’ and ‘precariousness’. Overall, this article – based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Italian migrants in Belgium – expands our understanding of undocumented migration by demonstrating how arbitrary and intimidating bureaucratic processes undermine the exercise of EU citizenship.

The objective of this article is to analyze the preparation process of young Moroccan migrants directed towards Italy. My focus is on the personal and collective formulation of their desire to leave and on concomitant action taken to realize these aspirations; highlighting the complexity of the imagination, which migration -and expected return -entails.A second point of attention is the agency exerted by such youth during preparation for departure; even when they have not physically left the country yet. In addition, my observation is focussed on networks emerging as a result of having to deal with state-imposed, migration restrictions, as well as with the politics of humanitarian agencies and NGOs. My discourse argues that these aspiring migrants project themselves into the future and act in accordance with what they long to become.They shape themselves as mobile subjects through a process of self-making to overcome the abovementioned constraints.

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This paper endeavors to understand the role of arts in migration-related issues by offering insights into the different ways in which artistic practices can be used by migrants and investigating migrants’ differing objectives in participating in the arts. Through the exploration of the initiatives of undocumented and refugee migrants involved in artistic groups in Belgium, this paper compares the motivations of the performers and concludes that art can operate as an empowering tool for migrants as it constitutes a space for agency, notwithstanding the specific scope of which it is contextually charged. It allows migrants to render themselves visible or invisible, depending on their contrasting motivations. The creative productions of the first group, composed by members of “La Voix des sans papiers de Liège”, a collective of undocumented migrants, corresponds to an explicit effort of political engagement in the local context. The other examples are of undocumented and refugee artists joining musical groups with no specific aim of promoting the cause of undocumented and refugee persons. The choice to be involved in such groups highlights their desire to be, in some ways, invisible and anonymous while participating in this collective of artists. Through these examples, we see that art offers opportunities for migrants to actively participate in the socio-cultural and political environment in which they reside and to claim various forms of official and unofficial belonging whether it occurs through visibility or invisibility.

This introduction and special section explores the legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss for the study of contemporary foodways. We revisit Lévi-Strauss' structural writing about food through different angles. To begin with, based on our ethnographic research with Moroccan cooks, we propose to consider some basic elements of food culture as an "alphabet", as a shared language and, more generally, as a formally structured and normalized set of practices. Then, the first research article of this special section proposes to use Lévi-Strauss' model of myths in a novel way, by bringing culinary and social practices in Western Kenya into relation through the concept of mereological ambivalence. In the second and third articles, Lévi-Strauss' so-called culinary triangle, which represents a semantic field within which the various forms of food's transformation are structurally meaningful and constitutes possibly his most well-known theoretical contribution to food studies, will be explored and questioned through contemporary practices of dumpster diving in London and the discourse among raw food eaters in France and the United States. Overall, this special section hopes to demonstrate that despite valid and enduring critique of his semantic models, Lévi-Strauss' theoretical engagement with food can still generate exciting and fruitful analysis of contemporary foodways.

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