Paper short abstract:

Archipelagic Cosmology maps migration narratives of eight men and their contemporary Afro-Mediterranean crossings. Through listening to these stories and mapping their journeys, I hope to suggest that this creates a portrait of the black diaspora as archipelagic.

Paper long abstract:

Archival recordings of the Afro-Mediterranean Oral History Project are records of the intimate lives of African migrants' relationship with the Mediterranean Sea. Like maps of the night sky, lines of African mobility portray constellations, cosmos, and galaxies as organic documents that change in shape and direction with the subject's position, yet they are identifiable as living webs of maritime mobility. The archipelagic, as defined by Michelle A. Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, lends itself to fluid cartographies of literal and metaphorical connectivity. The archipelagic unites islands and stars in their holistic isolation, thus forming a cosmology of intimacy. As our larger panel explicates, the migratory journeys of these men are individual quests that are simultaneously unique and recognizable in a deeper pantheon of African diasporic narratives: linked through the violence of crossings, reunited through media and technologies of communication, and shared through narratives of place, displacement and memory. Literally, this paper traces the ways in which Afro-Mediterranean mobility is an identifiable archipelago across the night sky and the sea floor; and figuratively, the Afro-Mediterranean archipelagic portrait connects distant space, deep time, and future trajectories to gesture to a cosmic portrait of an archipelagic black diaspora.

Paper short abstract:

From the margins of his known world, in the middle of the Mediterranean the only thing Mohamed could see was water, water everywhere and the sky above. How was it possible for Mohamed who made the crossing to imagine a life on earth, beyond the never-ending Sea?

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic examples and conceptualisations emerging from research participants who have experienced illegalised border crossing from Egypt to Italy. What resulted from our collaboration through creative storytelling processes were narratives that did not place the protagonists merely in their past or present routine struggles. Their subjective experience of the world was inhabited by imaginings that combined temporalities in very particular ways. An imagined future was remembered as part of one's past dreams, lived experiences or future possibilities became intrinsically part of the present when existential circumstances suddenly changed. But imagined existential possibilities are dimensions of experience that lie beyond the immediate perception of objects and landscapes. Concurrently, illegal border crossing often happens in hostile environments where the reality of natural or infrastructural settings overcomes imagination and verbal articulation. How can social scientists investigate and represent these intangible realms of existence? Imaginings are not abstract products of consciousness but are embodied and embedded in people's present actions. So if imaginings are present to us, what qualities does their existence have? Understanding people's perceptions and imagination is not a theoretical question but a practical and empirical one. To be able to come close in understanding and presenting participants' discordant temporalities, experiences and stories, means to come up with responsive practice-based methods and a different, non-linear approach to ethnographic representation. Collaborations between creative and social disciplines, between scholars and art practitioners, is very fruitful in this sense. This research brought together anthropology, performance, storytelling, collaborative documentary and participatory animation.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with displaced people in the northern French and northern Moroccan borderlands, this paper explores the how of studying contingent camps; camps which are not architecturally fixed but caught in cycles of destruction and reinvention.

Paper long abstract:

While the camp is most often understood as a fixed, humanitarian or institutional space of confinement, hardened migration control strategies have given rise to ephemeral forms of encampment which stretch the scope of what we understand as camp spaces. This article explores methodologies for studying contingent camps; camps which are not architecturally fixed but dynamic and shifting, caught in constant cycles of destruction and reinvention. In their ephemerality, contingent camp spaces are under-explored and tend to evade scrutiny. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with migrant people inhabiting contingent camps in and around the borderlands at Calais (France) and Tangier (Morocco), this article reflects on the methodological challenges of, and possibilities for, studying fleeting contingent camps which lack fixed boundaries and thresholds. In response to the uncertain ontology of these places, this article proposes a methodological approach grounded in assemblage

theory. It contends that contingent camps may best be explored as assemblages, through an experimental combination of embodied ethnography, forensic explorations of camp materialities, and the study of camp atmospheres through the immaterial practices of its residents. This article shows how a methodology grounded in assemblage may allow us to look beyond the camp as an explicit architecture of containment, to begin to understand how a camp logic insidiously permeates the materialities, atmospheres and temporalities of contingent camps.

Paper short abstract:

Elephant & Castle is well known as the biggest centre of the Latin American community in the UK. A proposal for the site's redevelopment is threatening their continued presence. This paper introduces my work as an illustrator drawing attention to the topographical imaginary of local residents.

Paper long abstract:

External visitors to Elephant and Castle have a visual experience that is dominated by the timeworn materiality of the physical space. As an illustrator I am able to draw attention to the topographical imaginary, the mental image of local residents, populated with associated stories, memories and experiences. In collaboration with Latin Elephant, a local charity that promotes the inclusion of migrant and ethnic groups in processes of urban change, I designed a participatory project structure, which resulted in illustrated outputs that speak of the vitality of the community.

In this paper I propose that images are performative rather than representational - in their act of existence they make and present the world they refer to. I argue that in carefully considered participatory project structures illustration has the potential to act as a catalyst, focal point and trace of collective world-making, lending marginal communities a voice to communicate with each other as well as external publics.

My work aims to visualises otherwise invisible social relations, perceptions and habitual uses of a place resulting in a graphic palimpsest of spatially grounded stories. The work materialises the social relations that contributed to its making, and subsequently speaks of them to others, as it encounters other audiences and publics. Illustration projects can facilitate 'making sense together' (Forester 1985), or materialise 'the wandering labour of sense' (Nancy 1997).

Paper short abstract:

Departing from a reflection on instruments, I explore migrants' relationships with urban space through play. We play instruments and we also play cities. Play engages us to look at the ways we incorporate urban resources and resort to them in order to juggle the demands of everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

Playing instruments, like using a city, is a highly complex activity, involving motor skills, perception and intuition from a human agent, and the physical affordances and (musical) possibilities of an instrument. Phenomenology, and the work of Merleau-Ponty in particular, has alluded to the blurring of boundaries between the player and her instrument. We play instruments and, I argue, we also play cities. As a heuristic, play engages us to look at the ways we incorporate urban resources and resort to them in order to juggle the demands of everyday life. We play the city to accomplish tasks, to get things done. Play is the skilled act of connecting needs to solutions, matching tasks to resources available in urban space. Play sheds light on the human capacity of raising locations and joining their spaces through gathering or assembly.

By recourse to ethnographic fieldwork undertaken with migrants in Lisbon, I explore participants' processes of learning to play the city and the extent to which these processes respond to the urgencies for settlement and emplacement. As I argue throughout the presentation, migration sharpens the process of learning to play. Although we all learn to play the cities where we live, experiencing migration exposes the urgencies of making do with an unfamiliar environment. The paper argues that whether migrants or not migrants, we live urban lives and we become equipped with the urban. Playing the city makes us look at how resourcefulness is practiced.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores place-making in two towns that emerged from a 19th century Alsatian migration to Texas. Drawing from archaeology and linguistic anthropology, I examine how migrants and descendants have built ideas of and relationships to historic migration into the landscape across generations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a 19th century Alsatian migration to Texas and the places that emerged from that migration. In particular, this research focuses on two Alsatian-Texan towns to the west of San Antonio, both of which originated from the same Alsatian migration but have made divergent decisions regarding their landscape and approaches to place-making through time. Both towns have inscribed identity and migration into their physical landscape in subtle and overt ways - but of course, places never simply exist as physical locations or points on a map. They also occur through the creation and maintenance of historical imaginaries, daily practice and tradition, and narrative choices about individual and community identity. Drawing on approaches from historical archaeology and linguistic anthropology, I examine spatial and material choices made by Alsatian migrants and their descendants, as well as other migrants who joined the communities through time. Examples of these decisions on the landscape - the ruins of an abandoned townsite, the construction and reconstruction of an American railroad town, a relocated Alsatian townhouse, and an archaeological-site-turned-heritage-museum - illustrate how both towns have built ideas of and relationships to their historic migration into place through time. They also show, in tandem with oral histories and contemporary heritage practices, how these places navigate perceived and real connections between Texas and an Alsatian "homeland" across generations.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation will discuss media ethnography as a method to document diasporic place-making and Soviet imaginaries in the everyday of a Central Asian community in Brooklyn, NY. How may technologies of seeing and listening, otherwise used to surveil or still the migrant experience, help re-imagine public space as mobile, fluid and intersectional?

Paper long abstract:

How does human migration transform public spaces in contexts of environmental precarity and economic volatility? My research utilizes expanded media ethnography to research resilience, imaginary and knowledge transfer strategies linking environmentally precarious locations that have seen high emigration rates with communities of destination in the "global metropolis", where migrants seek permanent or temporary relief, or challenge moral geographies and normative discourses of identity. This case study is grounded in my ongoing collaborative research in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood in South Brooklyn, NY, home to an emerging multiethnic Russian-speaking diaspora. While the notion of “good place” may sound fixed and timeless, migrants often understand it as a timely process, requiring constant personal and community participation. Kinship and friendship entangle and compress geographic and historical distance, making “home” a dialectic, poly-semantic, multi-sited notion. From observations collected over the first two years of an ongoing localized media ethnography with documented and undocumented migrants, I will discuss some ways in which the camera, microphone, Google Street View and social media, often employed as tools of extraction, to describe, quantify and surveil social relations, may open conversations about belonging, adaptation and fellowship in the diasporic everyday. fruitfully complicating the ethnographer’s view of their field and re-configuring interactions with protagonists towards meaningful connection. Reimagining disciplinary boundaries, “blissful displacements” propose a mobile and dialogic ethnography of public space as transformation, inspired by Jackson and Piette’s “existential anthropology,” that considers technology, place and experience as subjects and makers of culture and politics, not as their objects.