Care and reunification in a Cape Verdean family: Changing articulations of family and legal ties
This article looks at the interaction between transnational family relationships, on the one hand, and family-related immigration policies, on the other. Taking the conflicting concerns that arose between administrative decision-makers and family members during an attempt to reunite a Cape Verdean family spread across several countries as an example, the questions of what ‘family’ means, what relationships are included and the nature of the relationships involved answered differently by different actors will be shown. The article discusses the way in which the regulation of transnational mobility according to specific categories of eligibility is giving social ties a concrete legal form whi…
Deportation, Crisis, and Social Change
In contemporary migration policy and practice across the globe, deportation has emerged as an apparently inevitable response to real, or otherwise perceived, migration crises. A skeptical attitudetoward the analytic use of “crisis” in the context of deportation is called for, as is the need to concentrate on the political genealogy of the term, which culminates in the justification of “emergency” policies and the implementation of new measures of control. Yet, at the same time—when states govern undocumented or unwanted residents through deportation and employ the notion of crisis for justifying irregular and often violent acts towards deportable subjects—a situation emerges that indeed sha…
A shifting yet grounded transnational social field: Interplays of displacement and emplacement in African migrant trajectories across Central America
In this article, we draw on the volatile complexity of African migrant trajectories in Central America to broaden the scope of transnational scholarship. These trajectories are characterised by mobilities as well as immobilities, taking shape in particular local contexts. By focusing on the interplays between displacement and emplacement that are part of these trajectories, we aim to increase our understanding of the extent to which migrants still ‘on the move’ experience both temporal embeddedness and cross-border connectedness, thereby acknowledging and unravelling transnational lives as they ‘touch the ground’ en route. To do so, we build on long-standing scholarly commitments in Central…
O evento na categorização de migrantes: Explorando questões de “eventfulness” nas Américas
Abstract The categories that define people on the move must be understood as unstable, contingent, and provisional processes. This paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship that explores the lived complexities of migrant categorization and their social implications. Based on fieldwork in Brazil and Central America, the paper investigates the processual character of categorization by intertwining temporal and spatial dimensions, focusing on specific events to understand the occasions, circumstances, and intentions that bring about adapted or entirely new categories. An eventful notion of categorization demonstrates not only how categories come into being but also how categories rema…
Die Grenzen der Solidarität
This paper uses the COVID-19 pandemic to reflect on the relationship between governance and solidarity It considers how a social model based on self-regulating individuals has been complemented by a new form of state dirigisme reliant on evocations of solidarity However, this configuration may be approaching the limits of its viability Given that governance relies on the robust internalization and execution of both care and control and on an ethos of renunciation, especially among the middle and upper classes, the paper proposes the need for analyses that better incorporate concepts of social inequality © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co KG, Gottingen 2020
Expecting justice: struggling with the indeterminate between ideals and practices
This commentary contextualizes Jacobs’ study as a contribution to a body of anthropological research concerned with theorizing the state, and more importantly concerned with closing the analytical ...