This workshop inaugurates a network of early career social scientists researching the racial and gendered dynamics of migration and bordering in the Global South. It emerges in response to the ongoing situation of anti-black and anti-immigrant violence in Tunisia, precipitated by statements President Saied made calling for the deportation of sub-Saharan African migrants and stoking racial violence against them. As scholars of the region point out, racialized discourses regarding sub-Saharan migration are not new to Tunisia nor new to North Africa at large. Neither is this phenomenon confined to Euro-Africa. In the Americas, growing numbers of African migrants are exposed to racialized violence alongside their Caribbean and Central American counterparts. The workshop convenes scholars working in these and other Global South borderzones to form a network that is able to respond to such realities through our scholarship and in public activism.
Participants
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, Yale, co-organizer
Ahlam Chemlali, Danish Institute of International Studies, co-organizer
Vivian Chenxue Lu, Rice University
Douglas de Toledo Piza, Lafayette University
Thayer Hastings, City University of New York
Omawu Diane Enobabor, City University of New York
Katherine McCann, Columbia University
Anna Simone Reumert, Columbia University
Eva Melstrom, Macalaster University
Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen is a Lecturer with the Council on African Studies and the Council on Middle East Studies. She is a feminist geographer whose work focuses on the relationship between borders, race, and political economy between Africa and Europe. Her first book project, entitled Bordering Blackness: The Production of Race in the Morocco-EU Immigration Regime, draws on 11 months of ethnographic research among West and Central African migrants moving through or contained within Morocco. Her next project, tentatively titled Afrophobia in the African City: Migration, Violence, and the Political Economy of Difference, examines how urban space across the continent is being reshaped materially and socially as a result of intensifying migration control regimes, and how racial and ethnic difference is used to signify the legitimacy of particular claims to citizenship, mobility, and the right to the city.
Ahlam Chemlali is a PhD fellow at DIIS – Danish Institute for International Studies, Dept. of Migration and Global Order and Aalborg University, Dept. of Politics and Society in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research explores the effects of European border policies in North Africa, with particular emphasis on the local and gendered effects in the Tunisian-Libyan borderlands. Prior to her PhD Chemlali worked almost a decade in a human rights organisation on issues related to migration, violence and torture. Chemlali has published in Geopolitics, Trends in Organized Crime, Forced Migration Review and Revue Tunisienne de Science Politique.
The workshop is co-sponsored by the Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement and Humanitarian Responses (PRFDHR), the Council on African Studies (CAS), the Council on Middle East Studies (CMES), and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.