Hybdrid event (Face-to-face and online via zoom)

Venue: Room S1, second floor, 28 rue des Saints-Pères - 75007 Paris and also online via zoom

This event is part of the Migration and Mobility seminar.

This seminar is organised with Institut Convergences Migrations

Speaker:
Paolo Boccagni, professor of sociology, University of Trento 

Young male asylum seekers from West Africa, such as my fieldwork interlocutors in a reception centre in Italy, have their own, mostly implicit attitudes and imaginaries about the future. Their very histories of migration have also to do with the perceived impossibility to accomplish a meaningful future in Africa, including one’s transition to adulthood and to normatively predominant ways of personhood and masculinity. However, these biographical aims are likely procrastinated further ahead, once people find themselves in the protracted uncertainty of 'refugeehood', as asylum seekers in Europe. Does the promise of “more future” still hold, and in what respects? How do migration and its aftermath shape young Africans’ ability to nourish (which) future imaginaries, and move towards them? Future, within an asylum centre, is a slippery and elusive topic. Views and representations about it are generally unfocused, beyond the short-term need for legal, work and housing autonomy. However, the residents’ endeavours to envision what might come afterwards share two moral orientations, while struggling to temporalize them: a medium-term desire to make a family life of one’s own, “like anybody else”, and a longer-term commitment to get back “home” (i.e. the country of origin), thereby eventually healing the moral wound of migration. From a present of biographical and socio-legal suspension, asylum seekers are hardly in a position to predict their future. Yet, they are not short of views, aspirations and dreams about it. How future-making emerges from their present emplacement, and in what directions, is then the key question of my ethnographic exploration.

Scientific coordinator: Thomas Lacroix, Sciences Po-CERI

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