On migration, proportion, and texture

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Venue
Russell Square: College Buildings
Room
G52

About this event

Dr Alice Elliot (UCL Department of Anthropology)

How do we speak, think, and write of migration when it presents itself ethnographically not only as a national/transnational movement of people, but as a constitutive component of life itself – an entity through which kinship relations are nurtured, the passing of time is measured, gendered subjectivities emerge and are recognised? In this paper, I draw on my research in emigrant areas of North Africa, swept since the 1970s by transnational movement towards Europe, and trace how migration has come to permeate the places where it originates, coming to bear on the very principles, categories, imaginings and practices around which local life unfolds. I argue that both proportion and texture of the socio-economic concept of ‘migration’ come to be radically redrawn when observed in the areas from which migrants depart – and, ideally for many of them, where they will one day return.

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Dr Alice Elliot On migration, proportion, and texture

About the Speaker

Alice Elliot is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of University College London (UCL). A social anthropologist, she has been conducting ethnographic research since 2006 between North Africa and Europe on the social and intimate dimensions of migration and, more recently, on those of economic crisis and Arab revolutions.

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: cb92@soas.ac.uk