31.10.23

Viola Castellano | University of Bayreuth

The presentation will discuss some preliminary observations on an ongoing collaborative project called “Gambian Returnees as Knowledge Producers on the Border Regime”, which focuses on the experiences and visions of migrants who returned to Gambia through EU and IOM sponsored programs. The project is interested in the recent shift in global migration management towards policies of border externalization, repatriations, and international cooperation, as told, rationalized, and contextualized by the subjects of those very policies. Engaging with returnees as co-theorizers, it aims at exploring the multiple and relational dimensions of return through a participative and reflexive methodology, creating a public platform for knowledge sharing together with research collaborators. The presentation will reflect on the process of constituting a working group on these
issues, analyzing and mapping policies and their effects collectively, deciding what to share with a broader public and how. In so doing it will reflect on the ambiguities, and challenges the project is posing, in terms of positionality, method and theorizing as well as on the anthropologists’ role as facilitators of such collectively elaborated forms of (counter)knowledge amid the epistemic, political, and material inequalities in which they are caught and in a increasingly militarized border regime.