Events

African Queer & Trans Displacements is a two-day conference bringing together scholars, policymakers, practitioners, advocates and activists working on the forced or voluntary migration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI+) Africans. The intersection of sexuality, gender and displacement remains understudied, especially in Global South contexts, despite the fact that the vast majority of the world’s queer migrants, refugees and asylum seekers live in these countries. At the same time, the social, legal, political and economic needs of LGBTQI+ migrants, refugees and asylum seekers remain overlooked by both queer rights movements and migrant/refugee rights movements, resulting in inadequate support services and poorly developed policies. This conference aims to foster dialogue across these divides, while also providing space to engage with migration scholarship centred on Africa and its peoples. Existing scholarship tends to elide the cultural, linguistic and social differences of LGBTQI+ individuals seeking asylum, homogenising disparate experiences and backgrounds under the broad category of ‘queer asylum seeker’. Countries of birth are largely presented as inconsequential, or as narrative elements rather than critical considerations. This provides little clarity of the specificities of leaving any one place, and even less of an understanding about the relationship between places left behind […]

This special seminar is being hosted by the Refugee Law Initiative (RLI) in London, the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) in Johannesburg, and the East African Centre for Forced Migration and Displacement (ACFMD) in Nairobi. The seminar will discuss the recent Asylum Partnership Arrangement signed between the UK and Rwanda, under which certain asylum-seekers can be relocated to Rwanda from the UK for possible permanent settlement. The seminar draws on a range of perspectives from researchers and practitioners engaging with this issue. The event facilitates topical debate about the legality and feasibility of this agreement and the likely impact it will have on affected populations: What does this agreement mean for refugees and asylum seekers? What does the agreement signal for the global refugee regime at large? What are the major legal and practical obstacles likely to be encountered? What are the alternatives to such an approach for the UK? Will it have wider ramifications for refugees seeking protection within the EU? Discussants include: Allan Munyao Mukuki, East African Centre for Forced Migration Dr Nikolas Feith Tan, PhD Fellow at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and Aarhus University in international refugee law Zoe Bantleman, Immigration Law Practitioners' […]

Wits University’s African Centre for Migration & Society and the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab, invite you to a panel discussion reflecting on the meaning and implications of xenophobic violence for South Africa’s economic and political future. The discussion stems from a newly released  Xenowatch report: Xenophobic Violence in South Africa: An Analysis of Trends, Causal Factors and Responses. Drawing on more than a decade of original research across South Africa, the report describes xenophobic violence as an increasingly integral part of the country’s socio-economic and political landscape. Abetted by anti-immigrant attitudes, xenophobic violence is rooted in democratic deficits: threats to rule of law and constitutional credibility. It highlights that violence is distinctly spatialised, often occurring repeatedly in specific localities where economic and political competition is acute. It demonstrates that while inequality fuels popular dissatisfaction, political opportunists and entrepreneurs scapegoat and victimise immigrants and other outsiders for their own advantage. The consequences of South Africa’s anti-outsider violence extend far beyond the immediate victims but affect lives across many townships and informal settlements. Yet while violence has long been a local matter, the forthcoming national leadership contest has seen xenophobic rhetoric and mobilisation become increasingly well-organised and national. Together these reflect a […]

Half of the world’s 26 million refugees are children. Their formal education is disrupted, and their lives are too often dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about what the future holds. Even kids who have the opportunity to attend school face enormous challenges, as they struggle to integrate into unfamiliar societies and educational environments. In Right Where We Belong, Sarah Dryden-Peterson discovers that, where governments and international agencies have been stymied, refugee teachers and students themselves are leading. From open-air classrooms in Uganda to the hallways of high schools in Maine, new visions for refugee education are emerging. Dryden-Peterson introduces us to people like Jacques—a teacher who created a school for his fellow Congolese refugees in defiance of local laws—and Hassan, a Somali refugee navigating the social world of the American teenager. Drawing on more than 600 interviews in twenty-three countries, Dryden-Peterson shows how teachers and students are experimenting with flexible forms of learning. Rather than adopt the unrealistic notion that all will soon return to “normal,” these schools embrace unfamiliarity, develop students’ adaptiveness, and demonstrate how children, teachers, and community members can build supportive relationships across lines of difference. It turns out that policymakers, activists, and educators have a lot to […]

The editors and contributors of ‘Arrival at the Margins,’ invite you to attend a virtual discussion of their new special issue of Migration Studies. With interdisciplinary contributions from five continents, the issue calls on scholars to simultaneously centre and unsettle the margin: to recognise the multiplicity of margins as politically generative spaces, frequently contoured by sustained and varied forms of mobility.  It helps to recalibrate the study of human mobility, drawing attention to approaches, spaces, and transformative process underrecognised in contemporary scholarship. Date: 19 October 2022 Time: 2-3 pm UK / 9-10 am NYC Registration: Click here to register Click here for a free download of the introduction by Natasha Iskander and Loren B Landau

The African Centre for Migration & Society and Wits Department of Political Science cordially invite you to a seminar by Professor Julia N O'Connell Davidson (Professor in Social Research, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol) titled Slavery, Sex Work and the Paradox of Fugitivity. The prostitute-slave analogy has long figured in the rhetoric of those who, albeit for different reasons, stand opposed to female prostitution, and the assumptions and claims about sex work that inform it have been extensively critiqued by scholars and activists who approach prostitution as an earning strategy and seek to protect and promote the human, civil and labour rights of those who choose to sell sexual services. However, less attention has been paid to the fact that the analogy also rests on a very particular reading of ‘the slave’ and a very partial appeal to histories of Atlantic World slavery. Taking this observation as its starting point, this presentation considers whether more careful engagement with the literature on slavery could shed a different light on sex work. In particular, it asks whether the concepts of marronage and fugitivity that feature in more recent analyses of slavery and its afterlives could also have theoretical purchase […]