1.
Bjarnesen, Jesper, 1977-
(författare)
Diaspora at Home? : Wartime Mobilities in the Burkina Faso-Côte d'Ivoire Transnational Space
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
In the period 1999-2007, more than half a million Burkinabe returned to Burkina Faso due to the persecution of immigrant labourers in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. Ultranationalist debates about the criteria for Ivorian citizenship had intensified during the 1990s and led to the scapegoating of immigrants in a political rhetoric centred on notions of autochthony and xenophobia. Having been actively encouraged to immigrate by the Ivorian state for generations, Burkinabe migrant labourers were now forced to leave their homes and livelihoods behind and return to a country they had left in their youth or, as second-generation immigrants in Côte d’Ivoire, had never seen.Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, the thesis explores the narratives and everyday practices of returning labour migrants in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second-largest city, in order to understand the subjective experiences of displacement that the forced return to Burkina Faso engendered. The analysis questions the appropriateness of the very notion of “return” in this context and suggests that people’s senses of home are multiplex and tend to rely more on the ability to pursue active processes of emplacement in everyday life than on abstract notions of belonging, e.g. relating to citizenship or ethnicity.The study analyses intergenerational interactions within and across migrant families in the city and on transformations of intra-familial relations in the context of forced displace-ment. A particular emphasis is placed on the experiences of young adults who were born and raised in Côte d’Ivoire and arrived in Burkina Faso for the first time during the Ivorian crisis. These young men and women were received with scepticism in Burkina Faso because of their perceived “Ivorian” upbringing, language, and behaviour and were forced to face new forms of stigmatisation and exclusion. At the same time, young migrants were able to exploit their labelling as outsiders and turn their difference into an advantage in the competition for scarce employment opportunities and social connections.
2.
Lindberg, Emy, 1985-
(författare)
Dream Machine : an Ethnography of Football Migration between Ghana and Sweden
2023
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis examines football migration between Ghana and Sweden. Based on multi-sited, transnational, part-time ethnographic fieldwork that spanned 22 months between 2017 and 2019, it focuses on the everyday realities of Ghanaian football migrants throughout their labor migration trajectory. At the same time, the thesis contextualizes these experiences within the larger historical processes of neoliberalism, colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade. The theoretical framework draws on literature concerning dreams and aspirations, time and migration, family structures, race, and the enduring impact of colonialism. The thesis sheds light on the historical connection between Ghanaian and Swedish football as a colonial project, a national project, and a global postcolonial phenomenon, emphasizing the political economy of football migration. By zooming in on dreams and the footballing body, it then examines footballers as neoliberal entrepreneurs of themselves as well as objects of the industry’s racialized dreams. Next, the thesis draws attention to the temporal aspects of football migration, including institutional borders, capitalist timelines, and the time of the footballing body. The thesis goes on to explore family structures, particularly fatherhood, in the migratory and footballing context, showing how these structures are interconnected with the business interests of the global football industry. It further demonstrates how race and racialization are present in the Swedish footballing context and finally looks at return migration, investigating how migrant footballers seek to repay economic and social debts. As performers on a commercialized global stage, the footballers embody the dreams of people all over the world. They are commodified and seen as investments for the future, both by people at home and by those working in the industry. Their success generates profit and shows that the dream of migration and the dream of football can come true. This thesis uses the metaphor of the dream machine to understand how dreams operate both globally and locally. It examines the linkages between maintenance of the footballing body, transactions of care, practices of social inclusion and racialized exclusion, and the functioning of the global capitalist football industry. Doing so, it emphasizes the meaningfulness of the migration trajectory for individual footballers and their networks, placing these relationships at the very heart of the beautiful game.
3.
Lutz, Peter A.
(författare)
Tinkering Care Moves : Senior Home Care in Practice
2016
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation builds on the current anthropological studies of care relations in practice. It draws inspiration from science and technology studies (STS) and postfeminist technoscience. A qualitative ethnographic approach grounds the empirical data collection and analysis. This entails ethnographic fieldwork with senior home care in the United States and Sweden during 2007–2008 and 2011–2012. Analytical attention centers on how movements situate various tensions of senior home care in practice. Four interrelated published works comprise the main thematic chapters. Each article exemplifies how human and nonhuman relations move and mediate care. They develop several heuristic terms that advance ideas about how older people, aging bodies, technologies, spaces, and times that tinker each other through movements of care in practice. The comprehensive summary frames these articles with an overview of the primary thematic orientations and methodological concerns. A discussion of the main contributions and implications of the dissertation concludes the work.
4.
Utas, Mats
(författare)
Sweet Battlefields : Youth and the Liberian Civil War
2003
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation presents an ethnography of youth in Liberia and of how their lives became affected by a civil war which raged in the country between 1990 and 1997. The focus is on the experiences, motivations, and reflections of young combatants who fought for a variety of rebel factions. For these young people, the daily prospect of poverty, joblessness and marginalisation effectively blocked the paths to a normal adulthood; drawing them instead into a subculture of liminality, characterised by abjection, resentment and rootlessness. As opportunity came, their voluntary enlistment into one of the several rebel armies of the civil war therefore became an attractive option for many. Based upon one year of fieldwork during 1998, conducted among groups of ex-combatant youths in both the capital Monrovia and in a provincial town in the rural hinterland, I describe and analyse the young people’s own accounts of their involvement in the civil war; their complicity in atrocities, their coping strategies in the context of armed conflict, their position as ex-combatants in a post-war environment, and their outlook on their past, present and future.In the first chapter I set the scene of the Liberian civil war and discuss the central concepts on which my dissertation is built. Chapter two then takes up the methodological issues relating to the particular fieldwork conditions found. This is done by providing an account of my participant observation within a volatile community of ex-combatants in Monrovia. Chapter three deals with the nature of pre-civil war Liberian political and military organisational structures and their rootedness in pre-state institutions such as local warlordism and secret societies. In chapter four I look at the cultural setting of my fieldwork and track elements found within the legacy of violence, to oral literature and patterns of socialisation. Chapter five focuses specifically on the role and predicament of young women in the civil war. Whilst some became active fighters, most participated as auxiliaries in various capacities. Their accounts convey not only the tremendous hardship and suffering, but also reveal mechanisms which helped at least some to survive. In chapter six I discuss the question of a post-war reintegration of ex-combatants into peacetime society and show that the prospects of different groups depend primarily on their social and geographical situation, rather than on the negligible effectiveness of aid programmes routinely executed by international organisations and NGOs.
