No dia 2 de Dezembro, Emilio Caja (Instituto de Ciências Sociais da ULisboa) será o orador de um seminário do Grupo de Investigação LIFE, sobre o tema The politics of the errants.West African migrant subjectivities and struggles in Southern Europe between fugitivity and visibility. Será às 11h e exclusivamente online.

Short abstract:

This presentation draws from my doctoral research on West African migrant subjectivities and struggles across Southern Europe. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Sicily—along with shorter research in Lleida (Spain) and Lisbon—I examine: first, how migrants’ subjectivities emerge from their everyday lives defined by transnational kinship networks and state-imposed illegalization; and, second, how the characteristics of these subjectivities. The analysis shows that West African migrants often enact “fugitive subjectivities” (Emejulu 2022), characterised by opacity, mobility and tactical invisibility, to minimize exploitation and subordination. Urban and rural ghettos constitute key spaces where these opaque forms of political life emerge.

At the same time, migrants also engage in selective visibility through collaboration with NGOs, unions and solidarity groups, as well as public mobilizations within the legal boundaries of citizenship. This produces subjectivities that are neither fully fugitive nor fully recognisable within the state’s political framework. I argue that these practices constitute what Felwine Sarr (2016) terms a “politics of possibility”: experimental forms of life that evade necropolitical violence and challenge integrationist assumptions by sustaining alternative ontologies and hybrid political assemblages.

Short bio:

Emilio Caja is a PhD researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS) of the Universidade de Lisboa. His PhD research is provisionally titled “The politics of the errants. An ethnography of legally precarious West African’s migrant subjectivities and struggles across Southern Europe”. His research focuses on the forms of subjectivation, the practices of self-organization, and the circular mobilities of West African migrants in Italy and Southern Europe, both in urban and rural contexts. From this perspective, he also works on and reflects upon the forms, times, and spaces of encounter that these subjectivities and their struggles may have with practices of direct solidarity against borders and institutional racism carried out by activists and militants.

He has been active in different no border collectives, especially in the Central Mediterranean and in Sicily. Together with Francesca Esposito and Giacomo Mattiello he edited “Corpi Reclusi in attesa di espulsione. La detenzione amministrativa in Europa al tempo della sindemia” (SEB 27, 2022).