Borders and boundaries as resources for mobility. Multiple regimes of mobility and incoherent trajectories on the Ethiopian-Eritrean border

Massa, Aurora

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.01.007

Cited by 30 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…It has proven to be a fruitful analytical lens to further debunk the simplistic notion that the outcome of migration solely depends on a momentous go/no-go decision in a country of origin. With the focus on the journey, migration scholars have become sensitive to the non-linearity of migration processes (Mainwaring and Brigden 2016), the encounters between migrants and mobility regimes (Schapendonk et al 2018), the importance of serial decision-making (Crawley et al 2018; Van der Velde and van Naerssen 2011) and changing identities (Innes 2016), as well as undertheorised issues such as incoherence (Massa 2018) and chance (Gladkova and Mazzucato 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The conceptual limits of the ‘migration journey’. De-exceptionalising mobility in the context of West African trajectories

Schapendonk

Bolay

Dahinden

2020

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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The 'migration journey' has proven to be a fruitful lens to question the simplistic notion that the outcome of migration solely depends on a momentous go/no-go decision in the countries of origin. At the same time, we argue that the normative/sedentarist principles of migration studies produce the risk to approach the journey as an exceptional phase of mobility, in-between presumed place-based lives. This paper therefore aims to explore the conceptual limits of the migration journey literature. To challenge the notion that the migration journey is fundamentally different from pre-and postmigratory mobilities, we combine two empirical research projects that have followed the im/mobility trajectories of West Africans. The first project focuses on the trajectories of itinerant gold miners within West Africa, the second concentrates on the im/ mobility of West Africans within Europe. By juxtaposing the empirical insights of these seemingly different contexts, we stress the need to embed migratory movements in a continuous field of mobility practices across spaces in Africa and Europe. This results in our plea for a research agenda that does not see 'migrancy' as a pre-given marker of difference, but as a normative artefact of mobility regimes.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The conceptual limits of the ‘migration journey’. De-exceptionalising mobility in the context of West African trajectories

Schapendonk

Bolay

Dahinden

2020

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

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“…Some studies have illustrated the contextual and situational character of self‐identification. For example, in her studies of Tigrinya‐speaking Eritrean refugees and Ethiopian returnees in Mekele (Ethiopia), Massa (2017, 2018) found that her participants mobilized different senses of belonging and identification contextually at various points of their life. Another empirical example of the contextual nature of self‐identification is Sökefeld's (1999) examination of a Pakistani man, Ali Hassan, in which the subject adopted various and at times contradictory identities in different social settings.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

First‐Generation Refugees’ Rejection of Racial Self‐Identification in South Africa: Constructing Non‐Racial Identifications

Tewolde

2020

Studies Ethnicity & National

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Although racial classification in South Africa has been extensively studied by scholars, little is known about the extent to which post-apartheid refugees or immigrants reject the South African racial classification system. In particular, there is scant research on Eritrean refugees' self-identification patterns within the racially structured South African host society. The current study addresses this lacuna by exploring how first-generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers, who originate from an ethno-linguistically structured social system, self-identify. Semi-structured interviews with 46 participants were conducted. Largely, those who lived in isolated Eritrean ethnic communities rejected identifying by race and instead self-classified by identities they were familiar with in their home country. The results reported here form only part of a larger study that identified various themes. Four themes were identified in relation to this paper's specific research question: (1) identifying as human; (2) identifying as Eritrean; (3) identifying as Habesha; and (4) identifying as Tigrinya. The paper argues that non-acculturated and residentially and ethnically isolated individual refugees in South Africa eschew South Africa's racial classification system. The resistance to racialization by new refugees might hold potential for transforming the country's entrenched racial classification system based on Black, White, Coloured, and Indian categories as the social demographics of South Africa change in response to immigration. * Amanuel Isak Tewolde is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Social Development in Africa at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests include race, ethnicity, migration, welfare, and social development.

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“…Consequently, these routes can hardly be captured through concepts such as the 'migratory journey' with supposedly well-separated phases of preparation, travel, transit, arrival and settlement (see Schapendonk et al, 2020). The approach to the mobility trajectories adopted in this article is therefore better suited, as it leaves more room for notions such as incoherence (Massa, 2018) or chance (Gladkova & Mazzucato, 2017), to show that cross-border mobility within and outside Africa does not necessarily result from a migration project, nor is it necessarily conceived as 'migration' by those undertaking those cross-border movements.…”

Section: Mobility and Migration In Mineralised West Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Disentangling Mining and Migratory Routes in West Africa: Decisions to Move in Migranticised Settings

Bolay

2021

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This article scrutinizes the trajectories of African men whose cross-border movements intersect two types of mobility routes: mining and migration routes. Drawing on field research in Mali and Guinea, as well as phone interviews with male miners/migrants in North Africa and Europe, this article provides a case to empirically question some of the premises in the approach to migration decision-making by giving a voice to African men moving across borders who do not necessarily identify as (prospective) ‘migrants.’ Building upon International Organization for Migration data and secondary sources, this article starts by sketching where migration and mining routes overlap. It then examines, in detail, the mobility trajectories of men who were sometimes considered migrants and other times miners in order to identify how these different routes relate to one another. While overseas migration is certainly not a common project for itinerant miners, the gold mines constitute a transnational space that fosters the expansion of movements across the continent, including outside the field of mining. Rather than encouraging overseas migration, gold mines appear to be more of a safety net, not only for seasonal farmers or young people in search of money and adventure, but also, increasingly, for people who are confronted with Europe’s intra-African deportation regime.

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Borders and boundaries as resources for mobility. Multiple regimes of mobility and incoherent trajectories on the Ethiopian-Eritrean border

Cited by 30 publications

References 44 publications

The conceptual limits of the ‘migration journey’. De-exceptionalising mobility in the context of West African trajectories

The conceptual limits of the ‘migration journey’. De-exceptionalising mobility in the context of West African trajectories

First‐Generation Refugees’ Rejection of Racial Self‐Identification in South Africa: Constructing Non‐Racial Identifications

Disentangling Mining and Migratory Routes in West Africa: Decisions to Move in Migranticised Settings

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