Seminar room, Münsterplatz 19
Gastgeber:
Institute of Social Anthropology
Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration, Identity Documents and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe
Faced with exclusion by the increasingly hostile immigration policies in Europe, West African migrants have responded by drawing on kinship and generating new kinds of sociality. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate complex migration routes and the shifting demands of European states. West African migrants with precarious legal status mobilize and produce kinship to obtain identity documents, such as visas, work permits, residence permits, and passports, which enable them to travel, work in formal jobs, and stay legally in Europe. In settings of unequal access to citizenship, accelerated change and uncertainty, migrants work with kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine.
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