Material Culture and (Forced) Migration

Materializing the transient

Edited by Friedemann Yi-Neumann, Andrea Lauser, Antonie Fuhse, and Peter J. Bräunlein

Abstract: Material Culture and (Forced) Migration argues that materiality is a fundamental dimension of migration. During journeys of migration, people take things with them, or they lose, find and engage things along the way. Movements themselves are framed by objects such as borders, passports, tents, camp infrastructures, boats and mobile phones. This volume brings together chapters that are based on research into a broad range of movements – from the study of forced migration and displacement to the analysis of retirement migration. What ties the chapters together is the perspective of material culture and an understanding of materiality that does not reduce objects to mere symbols.

Centring on four interconnected themes – temporality and materiality, methods of object-based migration research, the affective capacities of objects, and the engagement of things in place-making practices – the volume provides a material culture perspective for migration scholars around the globe, representing disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, contemporary archaeology, curatorial studies, history and human geography. The ethnographic nature of the chapters and the focus on everyday objects and practices will appeal to all those interested in the broader conditions and tangible experiences of migration.

Click here to read more about the forthcoming book and download it for free!!!

Lecture

„Migration & Climate Change”

 09.03.2022 6:00 p.m. CET 

The fifth session of this semesters’ ENLIGHT Lecture series explores the connection between Climate Change and Migration as a growing number of natural disasters, extreme heat and drought will turn climate change into the most common cause of forced migration within the 21st century.

Speakers:
CeMig Member Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso (University of Göttingen, Germany)
Els Bekaert (Ghent University)
SuMing Khoo (NUI Galway)
Ashok Swain (Uppsala University)

You can register and participate in a Zoom Session or tune in on the ENLIGHT Youtube Channel where the lecture will be broadcasted live. Please register here for
the Zoom-session.

Each lecture is followed by a networking event for researchers from ENLIGHT universities.
They can not only continue the discussion on the lecture`s topic but also use the opportunity
to identify common research interests. This event serves as a platform for developing new
ideas for future cooperation within the network. The ENLIGHT team supports this process by
providing insights on funding opportunities. Researchers from all stages are more than
welcome to join in!

Please register here until March 9.

We would like to welcome and introduce Kari Anne K. Drangsland who is affiliated at CeMig during her fieldwork on temporalities of irregular migration in Germany in Hamburg from January 2021 until August 2022. 

Kari Anne K. Drangsland is a human geographer and holds a PhD. in interdisciplinary gender studies. Her thesis “Working to ‘Wait Well’ – Exploring the temporalities of irregular migration in Germany”, is based on one year of fieldwork in Hamburg (2017/2018). The thesis explores the role of time and temporality in the production of migrant illegality and in tolerated migrants’ embodied navigations of life and waiting in Germany. The past fifteen years Drangsland has worked with research, teaching and collaborative art and architectural projects within the fields of migration, integration, and urban geography. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway.

“My present research is part of the international research project “Temporary Protection as a Durable Solution – the Return Turn in Asylum Policies in Europe” (TemPro). TemPro is an interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology, geography, and law, and explores the turn towards temporary protection for refugees in Denmark, Norway, Germany, and the UK since 2015. I have just ended an ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and will in the spring of 2022 set forth the ethnographic research in Hamburg. During seven months in Hamburg, I will explore how temporary protection is configured in law, policy, and everyday practices of state bureaucrats and as well as how it effects refugees. I will also continue the research with Afghan tolerated migrants that I met in 2017. I am particularly interested in tolerated migrants’ navigations of the various possibilities of regularisation embedded in the German legal framework, and especially the role of labour in this respect. I am really looking forward to engaging in conversation with CeMig colleagues on these and related topics!”

Webside: Kari Anne Klovholt Drangsland | University of Bergen (uib.no) or Kari Anne Klovholt Drangsland (researchgate.net)
Contact: Kari.Drangsland@uib.no