Paper short abstract:

When access to ascendant trajectories are restricted due to liminal or non-citizenships and economic precarity, some refugee men seek and instigate unconventional routes.

Paper long abstract:

Education is imagined, for many refugee men in Greece, as a pathway to decent jobs, active citizenships and modern masculinity. However, access to higher education tends to be limited to people with local citizenship or official refugee status. Thus, young men stuck within the limbo of acquiring legitimacy as refugees through state approval seek unconventional routes to advance themselves. In so doing, they instigate proactive and reciprocal knowledge productions.

This chapter is based on ethnography conducted between 2012-2018 among solidarity movements in Athens, Greece. Alongside language class fieldnotes, I documented conversations with one hundred and three men from Middle-Eastern and Sub-Saharan countries, including thirty-two in-depth interviews. While stuck in liminality, with ascendant educational routes restricted, the men in this study emphasized their adaptive capabilities, and enacted their identity sensed masculinities as open-minded and morally caring persons. Simultaneously, many sought free language lessons offered by solidarity initiatives to increase their prospects. Within solidarity spaces, where their uncertain legal status was approached with reciprocity and autonomy by existing solidarity members, the men began to reconfigure knowledge production by teaching their own classes, highlighting the diversity of their home communities, and sharing their expertise with arriving refugees and volunteers. As a result, through inclusive practices and care across ethnicities, age, gender and sexualities, they engaged in transnational solidarity networks and increased their opportunities for the future, performing what I call proactive reciprocity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper traces two initiatives in a rural village in the West of Austria, to look into the law as a source of power in negotiations of citizenship for migrants and non-migrants.

Paper long abstract:

In the spring of 2015, a volunteers' initiative in a rural municipality in the West of Austria announced that it had invented and granted "municipal asylum" to two asylum seekers, in order to protect them from deportation through national authorities. Meanwhile, a second initiative began to look after the "integration" of the men concerned by involving them in voluntary work assignments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates the law as a central source of power to articulate and negotiate citizenship "from below". While both initiatives clearly positioned themselves in relation to the law and legality, they did so with very different effects, as they used the law to both politicize and de-politicize their strategies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore how Bulgarian migrant workers in Italy from different generations understand and use their rights to negotiate with their employees or institutions, and to examine interrelation between their identities, legal statuses, state policies of both countries and EU citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

After the collapse of state socialism, especially since the early 2000s, the migration including many women from Bulgaria to Western European countries dramatically increased. From the villages in the Lovech district, northern Bulgaria, where I have carried out fieldwork, a number of middle-aged mothers also made the choice to move as autonomous migrants and to work as live-in caregivers or domestic workers in Italy in order to send money "for their children" who were mainly teenagers and were studying in Bulgaria. These women decided to work abroad before Bulgaria joined the EU and most of them have at least several years of experience to work without a work permit on the one hand. On the other hand, in the past ten or more years, a part of their children has decided to work in Italy as an EU citizen after graduating from school in Bulgaria.

Drawing on a long-standing fieldwork in Bulgaria and on short-term fieldwork in Italy, this paper will show how Bulgarian migrant workers from different generations understand and use their political, economic and social rights to negotiate with their employees, or state and local institutions for better conditions and reveal if there is any difference of strategies and practices for demanding their rights between generations. Furthermore, we discuss interrelation between their identities, legal statuses, state policies of Bulgaria and Italy, and EU citizenship.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on one year of fieldwork to examine the (Dutch) state from the vantage point of (Egyptian) immigrants. Zooming in on the practices through which Egyptians managed the Dutch state in their everyday life, I argue for an understanding of the state as (re)assembled in practice.

Paper long abstract:

Despite recurrent critiques (e.g. Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002; Schinkel 2003), conventional immigration research still draws on the language and ideas of state policies, thus contributing to the elusive image of immigrants as a policy problem. Building on one year of ethnographic fieldwork among Egyptians in Amsterdam, I turn things around: from state-centered perspectives on immigration to an immigrant-centered perspective on the state. In doing so, I draw on but analytically move beyond the literature on the everyday practices through which immigrants construct a sense of home and belonging (Fog Olwig 2007; Feldman-Savelsberg 2017a) and cross-border affective circuits (Groes and Cole 2016). Unsurprisingly, the state figures prominently in these ethnographic accounts, both as an idea and as a system (Abrams 1988). Nevertheless, and probably because of the initial analytical move away from the state, very few scholars have turned their gaze back to the state. I aim to fill this gap by zooming in on the state as it assembled, disassembled and reassembled in the lives of Egyptians in Amsterdam. For the Egyptians I worked with, the Dutch state could be many things: a source of hope, fear and doubt; an educator, care-taker, and administrator; kin, friend, and foe. In its multiplicity, the Dutch state was a policy problem: How to understand and manage the Dutch state? In this paper, I explore how Egyptian immigrants solved the policy problem in practice in order to advance an understanding of the state as produced and re-produced through immigratns' everyday practice.

Paper short abstract:

The talk analyzes the immigrants' categorization in Israel and how it affects both the state immigration policy and immigrants. In addition, it presents the complexity of the categorization, which depends on how foreigners the immigrants are perceived.

Paper long abstract:

State immigration policy is derived, among others, from the state's categorization of foreigners. While one could imagine that this categorization is twofold - a person is either an immigrant or not - the reality is different: The more the immigrants are perceived by the state as foreigners, the more the state handles them as a collective rather than individuals. Moreover, this phenomenon is true also on the immigrants' side - the more they are perceived as foreigners, the more they operate as a collective.

The Israeli population has been created mainly by different groups of immigrants. Jewish immigrants (Olim) are treated different than non-Jewish ones. While Olim are eligible for citizenship upon their arrival, others are categorized by various criteria, which shapes their immigration experience. In this talk, I will discuss the main categories, including Olim, asylum-seekers and infiltrators, focusing on the State's utilization of these definitions and foreigners-based categorization, to create boundaries of movement, accessibility to services (health and education), exclusion and inclusion. I will present the differences between Eastern European and African immigrants based on this categorization. The talk moves along the axis between the private life story of individual immigrants and the collective story of immigrants and the state. The talk is based on an anthropological study focusing on Israeli policies toward non-Jewish immigrants, which includes the analysis of life stories of 20 non-Jewish immigrants from different categories and study of the main social and political events in Israel since 2007.

Paper short abstract:

Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with undocumented West African migrants located in Delhi, this paper explores how such migrants experience and navigate the law and state apparatus in India, such that entails practices of both friction as well as collaboration with the everyday state.

Paper long abstract:

The turn of the 21st century has seen a rising trend of migration from the African continent to India. While the actual numbers of migrants remain inconspicuous, relative to the population of India, Africans constitute a hyper-visible entry on India's social landscape such that has involved fractious exchanges and racial tensions. In a context where racialized hostility and antiquated colonial- era laws intersect to mediate the daily lives of undocumented African migrants, what are the entanglements with the everyday state that their migrant status so necessitate?

Drawing upon 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with migrants from West Africa as well as with Indian residents and authorities located across Delhi, in this paper I theorize the empirical optic of 'dead papers' to critically investigate the material, affective and legal afterlife of migration documents that are past their expiry date. Specifically, I explore the criminalisation of migrant illegality in India and stipulations around the 'exit visa' to argue that the ambiguity regarding return and deportation procedures for those in possession of 'dead papers' gives rise to practices marked by both friction and collaboration between migrants and various state and local actors. The contesting practices of overlooking on the one hand (by state actors) and of overseeing on the other (by migrant actors themselves) thus reflect the multilayered strategies of the everyday state as also migrants' negotiations of them that stand located and particularized within larger socio-economic and political contexts, state imperatives as well as migrants' aspirations and trajectories.

Paper short abstract:

From an anthropology of law perspective, the paper discusses increasing legal restrictions concerning refugee camps as a determent in German asylum bureaucracy and the ways refugees perceive and deal with those changings.

Paper long abstract:

In public discourse, immigrants often are supposed to adhere to the law. Besides the inherent suggestion immigrant would be less law-abiding than nationals this discourse supports a specific legal conception: Law as an absolute fact that is stable and timeless.

But actually, law gets modified constantly. With Naomi Mezey (2003) law may be understood as "one of the signifying practices that constitute culture and vice versa" (39). Law is always contextualized historically, spatially and culturally and therefore dynamic. Hence, law is not just the business of politicians and judges. It is highly interrelated with the cultural webs of significance (Geertz 1973) like everyday notions, discourses and ideologies.

Regarding German asylum law in context of mass accommodation and against the background of several qualitative interviews with refugees who were living in refugee camps, this paper discusses the legal negotiations of law. In the last years, asylum authorities have among other things decided to place asylum seeker and rejected asylum seeker in special mass accommodation facilities for at least six months for people with children and up to 18 or 24 months or even longer for people without children and depending on several other conditions.

Refugees are aware of those legal changes, but their influence is very much constraint by their legal status. Nevertheless, some refugees try to complain against the conditions at court, claim equal rights or at least fair treatment or challenge their situation by organizing resistance with people inside the camps or with supporters from outside.

Paper short abstract:

This papers investigates the multiple contexts where migrants resort to notions of rights to contest border regimes. It examines how equal notions of rights inspired the opposition to state legal categories and the formulation of rights'claims in the mobilization against border regimes in Germany.

Paper long abstract:

My paper addresses the interplay between legal status, collective identities and mobilization against border regimes in Berlin (Germany). The paper will draw on on a 11-month ethnography that I conducted in Berlin in 2018.

The paper explores how precarious legal status can become a salient collective identity enabling the mobilization of migrants against border regimes. It investigates how political mobilization challenges state-assigned legal categories and contests the legal notion of refugees.

Equal notions of rights inspired the mobilization against legal hierarchies and contested the stratified access to rights that migrants have access to as a function of their legal status.

My paper investigates the multiple interactions between migrants' mobilization and the law. Notions of rights shape collective identities and inspire the opposition against state legal categories. However, migrants and other social actors opposing border regimes in Berlin also resorted to notions of rights to frame their claims.

This papers analysed their claims, in particular the claim to universal freedom of movement and the right to stay. It explores how migrants interpreted that claim, whether they considered it as a human right and how they construct human rights.

The paper will examine the approach of migrants and other social actors that oppose border regime towards human rights and the law. Little is known about the interpretation of human rights of marginalized, subaltern groups such as migrants. This paper will resort to ethnographic data to shedding light on this area that has received little attention within the scholarship of social movements.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the significance and negotiation of "truth" and "credibility" in the construction of deserving and undeserving migrants in Germany. Focussing on the process of legal action, it investigates migrants' navigations and provides insight into the decision-making-practices in court.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution examines the significance and negotiation of "truth" and "credibility" within the construction of deserving and undeserving migrants in Germany. Faced with a "culture of disbelief", asylum seekers must convince the state authorities that their accounts are believable and thus possibly true (glaubhaft) and that they are credible as persons (glaubwürdig). In case of a denial, many applicants make legal claims, starting a process of legal action, which currently takes at least 2 years, before their case is heard in court. Focusing on this process of legal action, this contribution aims to provide insight into migrants' navigations, as well as the decision-making-practices in court. In this context, "truth" and "credibility" become not only a prerequisite for accessing rights, but also the object of constant negotiations between the German state, the asylum seekers and - amongst others- their legal advisors. These negotiations happen within a "framework of narrative power" (Niedrik and Seukwa 2010), in which "'Europe' maintains its self-image as a stronghold of human rights" (ibid.), by rescuing the "true refugees (victims)" and repulsing the "false refugees (aggressors)" (ibid.). Migrants from the Global South, however, bring narratives of "truth" into the asylum procedures that question and challenge this "framework of narrative power" and its binary legal distinction. On the institutional level, these narratives not only lead to complex negotiations within the asylum decision-making, but also provide valuable insight into the historically and socio-culturally constructedness of "truth" and "credibility" in the context of "asylum" in the Global North.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how actors in police encounters employ categories of otherness - particularly the category migrant - and how these relate to legal statuses. It discusses emic uses of analytic categories and the rationalities of emphasising otherness by both police officers and (non-)citizens.

Paper long abstract:

While police encounters are sites at which migrants' legal statuses are being produced, they are also sites at which their categorisation as migrants is being negotiated - whether actors are perceived as migrants in the first place. While the former is fixed in writing, the latter is situational, fluid and affective. The category migrant is also confounded with categories of cultural difference, ethnicity and race. Surprisingly, these categorisations are used by both sides; the German police increasingly recruits people who describe themselves as migrants, and some do not even hold German citizenship.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork on police-(non-)citizen interactions in Germany, this paper explores how the involved actors employ categories such as migrant, cultural Other, foreigner, and more. Instead of using them as analytic categories, the paper will study them as emic ones. Labelling practices by police officers are highly contested and scrutinised, and these interactions are characterised by stark asymmetries regarding power and knowledge. However, the paper also develops how both (non-)citizens and police officers employ these categories as a heuristic form of knowledge production, grounded in everyday experiences; these categories serve to differentiate people, emphasising certain differences while ignoring others (gender, class, etc.).

In what situations do actors employ the aforementioned categories, and which differentiations are excluded? How can (non-)citizens oppose, manipulate or subvert these categorisations? Lastly, how do these (informal) categorisations relate to legal statuses and work exigencies?

Paper short abstract:

My proposal to this communication highlights the results of an on-going analysis of the socio-legal modalities transforming bi-national couples into Swiss couples. My aim is to understand the normative bases that legitimize the legal conceptions relating to genuine bi-national marriages.

Paper long abstract:

In Switzerland, the socio-legal definition of the different foreigner statuses is legitimized by the concept of cultural proximity: it (re)produces a distinction between foreigners perceived as more or less desirable and undesirable, from a social and economic point of view, and more or less culturally close or distant, due to their national origins. Evolving at the intersection of this policy of control of migrant populations and the matrimonial law, the facilitated naturalization procedure by marriage produces a socio-legal conception of the genuine relationship. In order to grasp the normative support associated with binational marriages and mobilized by the Swiss state authorities, I explore the arguments used by officials, on the one hand, to assess the successful integration of applicants married to a Swiss national and, on the other hand, to cancel facilitated naturalisations acquired through marriage: what are the conceptions of a good marriage allowing the acquisition of Swiss nationality? And how can we understand the social dimensions underlying these concepts? In order to do this, I analyse the first and second instance court rulings pronounced between 1992 and 2019, using a structural approach, based on the articulation of the social relations (gender, culture, age, class, etc.) linked to the (re)production of the categories of foreign nationality spouses. I demonstrate that the deliberations find a normative basis in the conception of the good family leading to the (re)production of the nation. My paper focuses on the presentation of results that are currently being analyzed.

Paper short abstract:

In response to the increasing linguistic and ethnic diversity in Germany, which presents challenges to state authorities, migrant translation associations have been formed. This paper analyses the self-conception of language mediators as cultural specialists, helping the state actors to categorize.

Paper long abstract:

The increasing linguistic and ethnic diversity in Germany presents challenges especially to state authorities. How do they deal with situations of multilingualism and different linguistic spaces? Often they use people with knowledge of the origin language as brokers, who bridge information divides, know different languages and always have a relative outside position. In response to the increasing need for translation in state institutions, several associations of migrants have been formed, in order to mediate language and culture. Their work is often honorary and not recognised; nevertheless, specific trainings have been developed and numerous authorities come back to the support of this so-called language and cultural mediation.

Based on my ethnographic research, interviews and participant observation on interactions of migrants with state institutions, in this paper, I analyse the self-conception of a group of people who describe themselves as language and cultural mediators or brokers. Often they themselves have migration experience and therefore see each other as specialists in their "respective" culture, claiming the cultural dimension of social phenomena. They could also be identified as para-ethnologists (Beek/Bierschenk 2020), who defend their field of activity and competence externally, even against university anthropologists.

My contribution focuses on the aspects of brokerage, on emic translation theories and notions of "culture". My paper discusses, how migrants as cultural brokers experience state institutions and their clients and why they produce categories of "lying" migrants, by showing simultaneous complicity with the state authorities, as they are able to understand and to "know who is lying".

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses how Dutch family judges conceptualise the role of religion, culture, and ethnicity in their work, and how they take children's cultural and religious backgrounds into account in their decision-making.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on the role of conceptualisations of culture and religion in Dutch family law cases. Family and children's judges need to take decisions on a wide range of topics, dealing with issues ranging from divorce or paternity to child welfare and sometimes even youth criminal cases. Based on interviews with children's and family judges, lawyers, and child welfare professionals I will discuss how Dutch courts deal with court cases on children from migrant and non-migrant minorities, how they take families' ethnic or religious backgrounds into account when taking decisions, and what meanings they ascribe to religion or culture in these cases.

Most decision-making in family cases relies on the open concept "the best interest of the child", which leaves space for different kinds of norms on what good parenting is and should be. In the paper, I will analyse how judges conceptualise the role of religion, culture, and ethnicity in their work, and how they take children's cultural and religious backgrounds into account in their decision-making.

Many judges in this study aimed for a "colour-blind" approach, often avoiding to discuss culture, ethnicity, or religion in their hearings, unless parties involved in the case made explicit claims. Furthermore, judges specialising with different types of family cases seemed to differ in how they perceived the relevance of families' backgrounds in their work.