Events

As part of the Lunchtime Seminar Series, the African Centre for Migration & Society invites you to a seminar titled Gathering family histories from migrants and the women left behind: A methods perspective by Grascious Ncube (Department of Development Studies, University of the Witwatersrand). Within the growing scholarship on transnational migration, the methodological approaches and time perspective employed in these studies have received some criticism. One of the major critiques is that research tends to focus more on the transmigrants (those who move) and neglects those who remain behind. In addition, studies have failed to trace processes of intergenerational flows in migrant families over multiple generations, thus failing to incorporate family migration trajectories from a historical perspective. Indeed, relatively few migration studies are anchored on tracing the historical interactions and dynamics of migrant families and some criticisms have been levelled against the methodological approaches used by these studies. For example, these have been criticised for proffering situational realities based on individuals’ narratives whose standpoints are fluid and shaped by the continual changes in their context. This issue questions the adequacy, authenticity and epistemological validity of the reality presented in these family history accounts. In this presentation, Grascious addresses some of these criticisms through the use of multi-sited ethnography […]

As part of the Lunchtime Seminar Series, the African Centre for Migration & Society invites you to a seminar titled Places of promise or poverty? Urban informal settlements in South Africa by Eldridge Moses (Department of Economics, Stellenbosch University).   Since the 1970s informal settlements or slums have grown dramatically in number and size on the outskirts of South Africa’s economic centres in order to satisfy urban unskilled and semi-skilled labour demand. However,provision of basic services has not kept pace with the rapid growth of the urban slum population. In addition, school resources are constrained by the settlement of internal migrants on the outskirts of, and within cities and large towns. The mismatch between urban population growth and service delivery has manifested itself in protests, which are often violent and damaging to political stability. The South African experience, and indeed that of developing countries in general, suggests that while migration to urban informal areas may serve a necessary labour market function of reducing search costs for both the firm and worker, it by no means guarantees that individual rural-urban migrants and their family are better off than their rural counterparts who decide not to migrate in terms of education and health outcomes. It is also unclear whether […]

As part of the Lunchtime Seminar Series hosted jointly with the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS), the African Centre for Migration & Society invites you to a seminar titled The spectacle versus the ordinary: Urban change and narratives of difference along a 'Chinese' street in suburban Johannesburg by Romain Dittgen (African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand) and Gerald Chungu (School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand). Derrick Avenue in Cyrildene, a suburb in the eastern parts of the city, is the closest one can get to a clichéd Chinese (street life) atmosphere in Johannesburg. With its wide array of restaurants, businesses and significant numbers of Chinese residents, customers and shopkeepers, this activity node sparks imaginaries of a spatialised elsewhere while standing in sharp contrast to the surrounding, mostly residential, neighbourhood. Owing to the prevalence of visible Chinese markers and its demographics, this street has mainly been viewed as exceptional and different, contributing to divorcing Derrick Avenue from the rest of the city. Yet, at the same time and irrespective of its Chinese qualities, it also points to a number of urban dynamics that characterise Johannesburg as a whole, whether in terms of challenges or opportunities. If Derrick Avenue conveys the image of a disorderly strip with its over-crowding, […]

As part of the Lunchtime Seminar Series hosted jointly with the Mexican Studies Centre, the African Centre for Migration & Society invites you to a seminar titled Migration in North and Central America: Myths and realities by Jorge Schiavon (International Studies Department, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas). This presentation will analyze the migration phenomenon in North and Central America, stressing how myths and misconceptions have prevailed over serious analysis of the real flows. It will argue that the study of migration should emphasize its effects on development and on the four different components of the process: emigration, immigration, transit, and return. The central challenge of analyzing migration in North and Central America is to avoid analyzing today’s realities with yesterday’s lenses and tools. The more attractive and high impact migration studies will be those that evolve to studying migration in North and Central America analyzing regional migratory systems from a comprehensive (emigration, immigration, transit and return migration), inclusive (all relevant actors), comparative (in time and space), and interdisciplinary perspective, placing special emphasis on its effects on development and human rights. Historically, Mexican and Central American policy-makers and academics were mostly obsessed with the emigration component of the equation, while the U.S. scholars and policy-makers have only been interested in the immigration part. The […]

As part of the Lunchtime Seminar Series, the African Centre for Migration & Society invites you to a seminar titled Barriers to asylum seekers claiming their rights in South Africa's asylum management system by Susan Tolmay (Amnesty International South Africa). South Africa’s failed asylum management process has been well documented over the years. While a strong legal and human rights framework exists, the implementation of existing laws and policies, and even court orders is starkly lacking.  Amnesty International South Africa (AISA) embarked on research to gather its own data on the experiences of asylum seekers attempting to exercise their rights to get and remain documented in South Africa. The research set out to examine the status of Refugee Reception Offices (RROs) in South Africa, but inability to gain access to the three open RROs meant we shifted the focus to the effects of the closures of three of the urban RROs (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Crown Mines) on the lives of asylum seekers.  Aside from being in contempt of court orders, for years, to reopen the Cape Town and Port Elizabeth RROs (recently reopened), a range of factors make it extremely difficult for asylum seekers to claim and receive refugee status. Major issues include a lack of understanding or explanation of the […]

The African Centre for Migration & Society invites you to a Methods Workshop on Narrative representation and analysis of health and migration: An Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach to African literary studies, a guest session by Dr Chisomo Kalinga (Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Fellow, University of Edinburgh). African literary studies is becoming more representative of the diversity and complexity of the literatures it produces within the continent in regards to its critical engagement with discourses of health, wellbeing and illness. This discussion focuses on migrant narratives and introduces key theories that engage with methodology, which draws from indigenous, regional and multicultural perspectives. Kalinga discusses whether traditional approaches to literary analysis are adequately fitted for the kind of inquiry that is structured around literary studies’ Eurocentric fixations on invasion and intrusion of migrant bodies. Accordingly, the discussion will outline mixed methods approaches to African migrant narratives and their interrogation of medicine, treatment, health, wellbeing and identity. Modes of analysis include literary analysis (indigenous narrative interpretation, Interpretive community response and reception theory), qualitative methodologies in data collection (participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviews, narrative ethnography, and a minor application of thematic analysis) and community-based participatory action research methods in the study of African literary practices. Biography […]

As part of the Lunchtime Seminar Series, the African Centre for Migration & Society invites you to a seminar titled “What futures were they ‘waiting’ for anyway?”: Addis Ababan youth in cultural dissent in the years leading up to the Ethiopian revolution, c.1950s-1974 by Semeneh Ayalew Asfaw (Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University). In this seminar Asfaw shows how everyday social and cultural performative practices have been formative of political subjecthood for Addis Ababan youth prior to the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. Asfaw attempts to show the linkage between cultural dissent and the making of the Ethiopian revolution through an examination of social and cultural changes in urban space (particularly, Addis Ababa) among the youth between 1950 and 1974. Biography Semeneh Ayalew Asfaw is a researcher at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University. He is currently a PhD candidate at University of Cape Town in Political Studies at the Faculty of Humanities Research. He is currently researching for his dissertation project the relationship between urban space, rural-urban migration and social and cultural change among the young and urban in pre-revolution Ethiopia (c.1950s-1974). His research interest includes revolutions, social movements, popular culture and revolutionary terminology. He published and researched on areas ranging from music and […]

As part of the Lunchtime Seminar Series, the African Centre for Migration & Society invites you to a seminar titled “The Personal is Political”: Engaging in arts-based teaching and research methods to center wellness in classroom and community spaces by LeConté Dill (New York University College of Global Public Health). This seminar is framed by the popular saying from the U.S. Student Movement and Second-Wave Feminist Movement of the late1960s—“the personal is political”—to explore the connections between personal experiences and larger socio-political structures. Informed by the personal experiences of stress and trauma among students and research participants, this seminar will delve into how scholars can engage with literature, music, and visual art to not only deconstruct such trauma but also to map out multiple practices of wellness. Such arts-based knowledges serve as rich examples, particularly for public health practitioners and migration scholars, to critically examine our own analyses and role in engendering personal and collective healing, health, and wellness. Participants in the seminar will be invited to use their own experiential knowledges and seminar discussion topics to create a brief poem, song, or femifesto to generate new insights regarding teaching and research collaboration and dissemination strategies. Biography Dr. LeConté Dill is the Director of Public Health […]

As part of the Lunchtime Seminar Series, the African Centre for Migration & Society invites you to a seminar titled Political economy of informalisation by Zoran Slavnić (Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linkoping University). The concept of informal economy in Western economies is traditionally understood as denoting a sort of marginal, ‘separate’ economy, related to the survival strategies of marginal social groups, as distinct from the so-called formal economy that comprises mainly big companies as well as the state, which together with its institutions partly sets the rules and partly is itself an economic actor. Zoran's seminar has an ambition to critically re-examine this actual concept of informal economy, and to highlight the permeability of the borderline between formal economy and informal economy. Informalisation of so-called advanced economies is, according to the argument that Zoran puts forward, closely related to the wider processes of ongoing neoliberal restructuring of Western economies on the one hand and to the parallel process of the recomposition of Western welfare states on the other. Two notions of informalization are proposed: informalization from above andinformalisation from below. Informalisation from above includes corporate strategies of downsizing, outsourcing and subcontracting, as well as the coping strategies of the welfare state, both of which contain dynamic forces ofinformalisation in economies […]