Conférence Apostolos ANDRIKOPOULOS (University of Amsterdam) « Argonauts of West Africa Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe ». En collaboration avec BelMix Seminar

Séminaire ABBA

En collaboration avec BelMix seminar

Speaker : Apostolos Andrikopoulos (University College London)

Title : « Agronauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe »

Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe

Date: Friday 6 December, 14pm - 16pm

Place: ULB - Campus Solbosch, Institut de Sociologie (Bâtiment S), Room Doucy S12.123, 12th floor, Rue Jeanne 44, 1050 - Bruxelles

Abstract: 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.

Bio: Apostolos Andrikopoulos is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at University College London (UCL). Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and the University of Amsterdam. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow, he conducted a comparative ethnographic project in Ghana and Kenya on migration through same-sex partnerships. He is the author of Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2023), a book based on his dissertation, which received the IMISCOE Maria Baganha Best Dissertation Award.

Zoom Link : https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81979174956?pwd=XoCBVpK82iH7qOSFjgFE3vq626Ww7q.1

(ID: 819 7917 4956 Code : 863632)