Precarietat i im/mobilitat al Primer Congrés Català d’Antropologia

ACTE INAUGURAL: Hegemonies, precarietats i dependències: els contextos de producció del coneixement antropològic

La taula de debat inaugural té com a objectiu plantejar una discussió sobre el marc actual de la recerca antropològica situant-la en el seu context social, polític, econòmic i afectiu d’emergència. Es tracta de visibilitzar i reflexionar sobre un conjunt de pràctiques que no conformen simplement el context exterior de la producció del coneixement, sinó que són una part indestriable d’aquest procés. Això implica pensar com, d’una banda, les condicions laborals, els requeriments de les convocatòries de finançament, l’oferta de places i llocs de treball, els criteris d’acreditació i avaluació de la producció científica i, de l’altra, l’increment de la burocratització, però també les trajectòries individuals, familiars i afectives, o la mobilitat acadèmica i personal, entre d’altres, són condicionants que determinen l’orientació i el desenvolupament de la investigació. Com es relacionen aquestes condicions de producció del coneixement antropològic amb les nostres pròpies recerques? Com les afecten? Com es construeixen i són travessades per determinants de gènere, de classe o d’origen ètnic, entre d’altres? A partir de la intervenció de tres persones amb trajectòries diferents dins d’aquest context, pretenem obrir un espai de debat i de reflexió conjunta sobre les circumstàncies que ens afecten col·lectivament com a comunitat professional i científica.

Participants
Diana Mata-Codesal Doctora per la Sussex University. Antiga investigadora postdoctoral a les universitats de Deusto, UNAM i Pompeu Fabra. Forma part de l’Observatori d’Antropologia del Conflicte Urbà (OACU) i del Grup de Recerca en Gènere, Identitat i Diversitat (GENI).
Giacomo Loperfido Doctor per l’EHESS i la Università degli Studi di Bergamo. Ha tingut una Post-Doctoral Research Fellow a la University of Fort Hare i una beca postdoctoral a la University of the Western Cape (Sud-àfrica). Ha estat investigador contractat pel projecte Grassroots Economics (GRECO) de l’European Research Council.
Jordi Gascón: Doctor per la UB. Ha treballat des del 1995 en l’àmbit de la cooperació internacional, on ha estat coordinador de l’àrea de projectes de la Xarxa de Consum Solidari i de l’àrea d’anàlisi del Foro de Turismo Responsable. Actualment és professor lector a la Universitat de Barcelona i forma part de l’Observatori de l’Alimentació (ODELA).
Modera: Camila del Mármol (UB)

Can we afford waiting?

These are some of the considerations about waiting I presented as the keynote speaker recently at the ANTHROMOB international workshop on Mobility and the Future of Work.

Immobility and waiting have been often disregarded as irrelevant topics of study. In fact, waiting is often attached to those called left-behind, people who do not migrate but are part of families with migrant members. In particular women have often been perceived as “waiting penelopes” (Mata-Codesal 2016) from Homer’s Odyssey and the image of Penelope, who waits for her traveller Odysseus. The so-called Odysseus and Penelope syndromes are particularly illustrative of this: the former to name the feeling of displacement experienced by migrants, while the latter refers to the sense of abandonment experienced by migrants’ relatives. The impossible situation of waiting is sublimated and poeticized in this ancient epic, where love and faithfulness are able to overcome twenty years of separation. Penelope as the ‘left behind’ is commonly portrayed as passive, subordinated and lacking agency in their relatives’ mobility decisions. However, recent research questions the passive nature of the so-called left behind, and show the necessary roles they play in their relatives’ migratory projects and the development and maintenance of transnational social fields (Mata-Codesal 2015). People’s waiting for their relatives’ return may not just entail a passive inertial situation, in some cases we can even consider their waiting agential, active and intentional (Gray 2011), fulfilling essential tasks for the success of the migratory project.

Continue reading

Im/mobility and Waiting in Times of Uncertainty

anthromobI am honoured to be giving the keynote at the ANTHROMOB workshop on November 6th from 18.30 to 19.30 at University of Barcelona. I will be thinking aloud about im/mobility and waiting in times of uncertainty.

Migration studies were slow to incorporate immobility and non-migrants as proper research topics. There are by now convincing calls to continue with the incorporation of the motivations to, meanings of, conditions under which, and strategies to staying put vis-à-vis similar explorations regarding different types of spatial mobility (not only the one that crosses international borders). The need for this articulation is captured in the increasingly popular term im/mobility. The Mobilities perspective recognized from very early on that mobility requires “moorings”. The research agenda this turn set in motion became however too focused on developing a “nomadic metaphysics” and “mobile methods”. Consequently, stasis and the lack of movement have not received as much research attention as it was anticipated. In this presentation, I am concerned with the idea of waiting. In our era depicted as hyper mobile, and “owing to a predominant academic attention for ‘kinetic’ promises of transport and mobility”, waiting has not deserved much academic attention. At the best it is conceived in a very simplistic way as a waste of resources. But, can there be different ways of waiting? Can waiting, similarly to immobility, be a proper research object? And finally, can waiting be a useful concept to address life strategies and im/mobility decisions in a period of growing work precariousness and life uncertainty?

Renewing the migration debate

KNAW

Academy Colloquium ‘Renewing the migration debate: building disciplinary and geographical bridges to explain global migration’. Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, 16–18 October 2019

I am so happy that I will be discussing the future of migration research with colleagues in a truly interesting event next 15th October in Amsterdam. I will be talking in the session about “Migration as a function of aspirations and capabilities – new conceptual developments of micro level migration drivers”. It is an honour to be able to share with Jorgen Carling (PRIO) and Karily Schewel and Hein de Haas (UvA) the future of two-step models. For those interested in this approach, the paper published by Carling and Schewel in 2018 provides a good overview of the state-of-the-art and challenges facing this approach.

It is however ironic been discussing the future of migration research in a moment I am forced to leave Academia. I hope it is only temporary.

Differentiation processes between non-native groups in a Barcelona neighbourhood

Who can be from a place where virtually everyone –or at least everyone’s parents or grandparents– come from somewhere else? Who are “we”, in such a context? And, what resources can such “we” claim rights over? Over two years, from 2016 to 2018, I explored these questions in a peripheral neighbourhood in the city of Barcelona. The area, which was traditionally subjected to territorial stigma, was built in its current shape by internal migrants coming to the city from other parts of Spain in the second half of the twentieth century. More recently, at the turn of the millennium, people coming from abroad moved in to this part of the city. In such a context, how do the more established groups differentiated themselves from the more recently arrived?

The research identified the boundary-work carried out by the more estabished group and how it is substantivized thanks to the Barcelona-wide “civic ideology”. This way the project  showed how concrete public policies and the rhetoric used to justify them serves as a resource for the articulation of social boundaries at the micro level.

By focusing on the discursive construction of we and them between internal and international migrants, the research contributes to the denaturalisation of the sometimes problematic clear-cut categorization between internal and international migration as King and Skeldon did in their fantastic 2010 article Mind the gap! Integrating Approaches to Internal and International Migration, and which is one of the negative consequences of the well-spread methodological nationalism in Migration Research (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002).

The article is coming soon in the prestigious journal Ethnic and Racial Studies!

https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1599131

CfP Participatory Methods in Migration Research

Call for Papers

PARTICIPATORY METHODS IN MIGRATION RESEARCH

SPECIAL ISSUE IN MIGRATION LETTERS

DEADLINE: 15 DECEMBER 2018

[You can download the pdf version of the CfP here]

ml_cover-197x300

Human mobility is a highly interdisciplinary and complex issue which has been approached from diverse national academic traditions and methodologies of investigation (DeTona et al 2010). Although the study of migration was initially dominated by empiricist-positivist approaches, there is by now a well-established tradition of qualitative studies (Iosifides and Sporton 2009). More recently, within the realm of feminist, critical and experimental scholarship, there has been an upsurge of new and creative methodological developments. These include a diversity of participatory approaches, ranging from social action-research, to research involving different types of participation (Arnstein 1969). This is particularly relevant at a time when not only scholars but also different institutions are currently promoting participation and societal involvement in research. This work has questioned well-established separations such as those between researcher and research participants, or between academia, activism and social work (Pereira et al. 2016). So far, though, these studies have not received systematized attention and to a large extend remain as scattered small case studies. Trying to redress this situation, this special issue aims to showcase overall connections and developments by providing an updated account of participatory approaches in migration studies, and to provide a fora to reflect on the possibilities, limits and challenges of making use of participatory methods in migration research. Continue reading

Cuerpos malolientes

A lo largo de la historia ciertos cuerpos han sido descalificados como malolientes. Los cuerpos de los mendigos, los extranjeros, los pobres, judíos, gitanos, prostitutas… todos ellos han sido en algún momento rechazados por hediondos. Los cuerpos explotados en trabajos físicamente demandantes, huelen siempre a sudor, indendientemente de lo limpios que en realidad estén, porque el olor es un marcador simbólico: oler es estar sucio, tanto física como moralmente.

Los grupos malolientes cambian según las necesidades del contexto pero los mecanismos de descalificación que utilizan el olor como marca de inferioridad se mantienen. En general lo que comparten todos los grupos calificados como malolientes es su localización marginal en el orden social. Algunos están en la parte inferior de la jerarquía, otros directamente están fuera de la clasificación social. Los otros, los inferiores, los diferentes, los marginados, los excluidos, huelen.

Texto originalmente escrito en catalán para La Directa: https://directa.cat/cossos-pudents/

Disponible en español en el blog de OACU: https://observatoriconflicteurba.org/2018/10/19/cuerpos-malolientes-huele-a-capitalismo-segunda-parte/

Si te interesa el tema tal vez quieras leerte el artículo en AIBR-Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana El olor del cuerpo migrante en la ciudad desodorizada. Simbolismo olfativo en los procesos de clasificación social.

Desired immobility

Presentation at the Panel on Two-step approaches to understanding migration at the IMISCOE 2018 Conference (2-4 July).

DhA832jXUAEX1CRAlthough immobility has gained status as a proper research object, its image as a default situation still prevails in some of the migration literature, where stayers are still labelled as ‘left behind’ (Jónsson, 2011). However, similarly to the migrant category which subsumes together different realities, the immobile label is imposed on situations that present internal disparity. The idea of staying put as the result of taking no action is severely compromised in the analysis of the ethnographic data collected in the small Mexican village of Zacualpan. In the socio-geographical context of this village, crossed and built upon a myriad of present and past mobilities, the research explores how villagers willing to remain, manage to stay put in a context of high physical mobility. Data show how, similarly to migration, staying put is often part of complex life strategies which involve changing mobility-immobility articulations. The ethnographic material supports the explanatory power of breaking down the aspiration phase from the realisation one to understand the (mis)matching between desires and capacities for situations of permanence (Carling, 2002). Three broad types of stayers are identified: desired, acquiescent (Schewel 2015), and involuntary (Carling 2002) stayers. The research particularly explores how villagers willing to remain, have managed to stay put in a context of high physical mobility, and how staying villagers perceive the desirability and feasibility of staying put compared with that of migrating.

índice