Viola Castellano - "Backway to Europe" Launch: A Roundtable on Borders, Migration, and Public Anthropology
Lecture abstract
Backway to Europe: Talking Borders and Migration with Gambians on the Move is a podcast series produced in collaboration with Gambian advocates and activists. It centers their analyses of the border regime through their direct experiences of “the backway” — the local term for the illegalized route to Europe. These experiences resonate with many who have attempted to reach Europe across West Africa and beyond. The first part of the series, composed of seven episodes, is a collaboration between Viola Castellano's DFG-funded project at the University of Bayreuth (Gambian Returnees as Producers of Knowledge on the Border Regime) and Youth Against Irregular Migration (YAIM), an advocacy organization founded by young Gambians who met in a Libyan detention centre. The podcast considers why the backway remains a widespread response to the economic and structural challenges faced by Gambian youth, and what it means to conduct migration advocacy from an African perspective.
This roundtable marks the launch of the podcast and brings together scholars to reflect on current border regimes, as well as public anthropology as a mode of engaged research. The discussion will engage with the podcast as both an ethnographic object and a public intervention: What does it mean to produce knowledge with rather than about communities on the move? What are lessons learnt for modes of engagement for anthropologists?
The "Backway to Europe"-Podcast (released bi-weekly) can be accessed here:
https://soundcloud.com/allegra_lab/visa-backway-to-europe
About the lecturer
Viola Castellano research interests revolve around ethnography of institutions, welfare and migration policies, borders externalization and global inequalities. She is now working as Senior Research Associate at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University, while previously she worked at the University of Bayreuth, Bologna and at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning. She is part of the Bayreuth-based research group Anthropology of Global Inequalities.