Upcoming events

The aim of this course is to equip research students with some of the relevant skills required to undertake postgraduate fieldwork in Africa. The presentation introduces the principal methodologies and strategies that are commonly applied to academic research in the Social Sciences, and considers their practical application for students who might undertake postgraduate fieldwork in Africa. In essence, the course will introduce researchers/students to some standard research methods and approaches from a perspective that is constantly mindful of the African setting – a setting that can present quite different challenges from the (implied) northern/western setting of many research training courses.  The presentation, which draws on my experiences of doing fieldwork in the Gambia, also discusses the hazards of doing fieldwork in Africa and general ethical issues and how they were dealt with.

Migration, irregular low-skilled emigration from developing countries in particular, has attracted a lot of academic and political attention. In many low and middle-income countries, migration is a prominent and sought-after prospect. However, the vast majority of would-be migrants never leave (involuntarily immobile) leading to a stark mismatch between the global demand for migration opportunities and the restrictive immigration policies of the desired destination countries. This mismatch appears set to grow in the coming decades, with swelling youth cohorts in Africa, especially, and strong anti-immigrant political currents in much of the Global North. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa, this presentation explores the strategies that young people, who find it increasingly difficult to migrate to the West, employ to fulfil their aspirations of social and economic advancement. These aspirations are shaped by intervening social, cultural and religious obligations and expectations.

Immigration is envisaged as part of an ‘emergent cultural cleavage’ across Western Europe. This public seminar focuses on the politicization of immigration in Portugal between 1995 and 2014. Politicization is interpreted as being formed by two distinct dimensions: salience and polarization of the political claims found within news articles extracted from newspapers. Notwithstanding the doubling of the foreign population settled in the country in the early 2000s, the diminished salience and the absence of significant political conflict suggest that immigration failed to become politicized in Portugal. Drawing on a comparative analysis with seven other European states (including new countries of immigration like Ireland and Spain) between 1995 and 2009, Portugal observed the lowest rate of politicization. Rather than being related with socio-economic factors, the lack of politicization of immigration was associated with the strategies of the mainstream parties, which successfully prevented the emergence of this topic as a significant political cleavage.