Unité de recherches "Migrations et société"

Piredda Angela

2013-05-13T16:07:03Z

Angela Piredda est doctorante à l'université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, en cotutelle avec le Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche dell'Università degli Studi di Milano.

Directeurs de thèse : Jocelyne Streiff-Fénart et Maurizio Ambrosini

Elle bénéficie d'une bourse "Master and Back - Avviso Pubblico 2011 - Alta Formazione", financée par la région Sardaigne.

Contact : angelapiredda@hotmail.com

Conférence “Rejouer les catégories : race, ancestralité et appartenance”

2013-05-07T13:55:45Z

Lundi 13 mai 2013, à l'Alliance française (Auditorium Marc Blancpain, 101 bd Raspail, 75006 Paris).

Conférence organisée dans le cadre du projet européen EUROTAST “A Marie Curie Initial Training Network on the History, Archaeology and New Genetics of the Transatlantic Slave Trade".

Une traduction simultanée sera assurée pour les sessions en anglais.

14h00 - “ADN et quête d'ancestralité”

Jean-Luc Bonniol, Professeur émérite, Université Aix-Marseille

Pierre Darlu, Directeur de recherches émérite au CNRS, Museum d'Histoire Naturelle

14h30 - “Race et couleur dans la construction de categories sociales : ‘desplazados' et ‘victimes de la violence' en Colombie”

Anne-Marie Losonczy, directrice d'études à l'EPHE

15h00 - “Legacies of slavery and contemporary identities in Kenya”

Patrick Abungu, Shimoni Slavery Museum and Heritage Site, National Museums of Kenya

Samuel Nyanchoga, Professor of History at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Kenya

15h30 Discussion, présidée par Hannes Schroeder (projet EUROTAST)

16h30 Pause

17h00 - “Généalogie, identité et génétique : perspectives d'associations de descendants d'esclaves”

présidée par Myriam Cottias (CNRS, CIRESC)

Program 4.2. Socio-economic uses of ethnicity

2013-03-20T18:01:11Z

Researchers : K. Argyriadis, G. Frigoli, N. Puig, C. Rinaudo
Doctoral student : O. Pollet

The reconfiguration of the majority/minority relationship through the development of creative and tourist industries represents a field that is strongly influenced by social and economic uses of ethnicity. Research undertaken since the 1990s on economic activities related to ethnic minorities has shown the existence and the development of “niche” markets in various domains. In this research program, we will attempt to measure and analyze the evolution of the position occupied by ethnic minorities – and the redefinition of the “question of race” that arises from it – in the productions of dominant cultures. The professionals in this market that are specialized in these sectors have become aware, following the American model, that minorities create trends and that urban youth have simultaneously become consumers and prescribers of styles for numerous products sold to a wide audience. These practices invite us to take into consideration the confrontations between the development of globalized forms of consumable identities that produce imagined transnational realities (“ethnic tourism”, “black beauty”, “black music”, etc.) and the national groundings that contribute to their structuring and their reformulations.

This program will also examine a number of issues related to individuals' physical appearance. In opposition to the still dominant perception that appearance represents an indelible part of each individual's identity, we choose to propose another form of truth : the incontestable fact that the deliberate manipulation of physical appearance is becoming an industry and a growing market, which does not only obey purely individual logics but also to more decisive ones, to ‘ethnic' ideals that are clearly identifiable as such (skin whitening, facial aesthetic surgery, various prostheses, etc.). It is not value judgments in terms of alienation or of futility that we seek to interrogate, but rather the content of practices of management and transformation of physical appearance : the uses of ethnic and racial categorizations in contemporary acts of bodily transformation, choices of self-presentation that emphasize codes that evoke diverse ethno-cultural ‘origins', and others.

These questions will be addressed through the following studies :

Controlling physical appearances among Afro-Cuban dancers and musicians from Cuba and Mexico (K. Argyriadis)
Merchant productions of otherness (G. Frigoli)
Cosmetic surgery, creation of faces and ethnicity in Lebanon (N. Puig)
Creative industries and commercial promotion of difference in France and Mexico (C. Rinaudo)
New figures of the universal artist (Denis Vidal)

Doctoral theses in progress : Ethnicity, nation and tourist development in Mexico (O. Pollet)

Program 4.1 : Artistic creations, technological exchanges and religious dynamics

2013-03-20T17:59:39Z

Researchers : K. Argyriadis, G. Bonacci, J. Mallet, N. Puig, M. Timera, De. Vidal, Dom. Vidal
Doctoral students : K. Maenhout, A. Rakotomalala

Artistic creations will be of interest here, in particular when they are the work of people or of artistic milieus in circulation : migrants, exiles, ethnicized and racialized minorities, etc. We will consider relocalized and multi-localized productions and practices, but also artistic productions of which certain have the explicit aim of maintaining a memory or of constructing an identity, as is the case through many forms of music, theater, poetry, literature, sculpture and architecture throughout the world. However, we will not neglect those forms that, on the contrary, endeavor with equal just as explicitly to escape such forms of identification. And we will also consider the decisive but still often insufficiently analyzed links between globalization and patrimonialization. The description of cultural creations will thus tend to show how these objects create and represent worlds, even while manifesting the tensions that are unique to exile, migration and circulation.

This program will also examine the way that technologies circulate and how they are gradually reinvented as they are reappropriated, in particular in the global South. A special interest will be paid to the analysis of unprecedented or little studied modalities of circulation, whether in regards to new forms of collaboration in which emerging countries play an increasingly fundamental role ; the manner by which modes of technological innovation associated with local context externalize and relocalize themselves ; the modalities by which migrant experience are marked by the diffusion of the internet among the working classes in the countries of the global South, encouraging the organization of virtual social connections and practices of digital self-representation.

Finally, the program will examine the productions, practices and exchanges of religious nature in the transnational and diasporic spaces of migrants. On the one hand, we will study the development of markets for ethno-religious productions (translations of sacred texts, conferences, sermons, narratives in literary or audiovisual form) and the way that they contribute to the construction of a collective “we”. On the other hand, an emphasis will be placed on the development of exchanges of a religious nature by analyzing in particular the question of the meaning given to religious practices in a transnational context.

These questions will be addressed through the following studies :

Ritual arrangements and reinterpretations of the meaning given to religious practices in a transnational context : La Havana and Veracruz (K. Argyriadis)
Cultural, institutional, and religious panafricanism : reggae, from black diaspora to urban youth in Africa (G. Bonacci)
National and transnational diffusion of localized music : tsapiky in Madagascar (J. Mallet)
Rap, slam and électro : emerging music and new socialities in Palestinian worlds (N. Puig)
Circulations and ethno-religious productions in transnational and diasporic space among Soninke migrants (M. Timera)
Circulation and appropriation of ‘new' and ‘traditional' technologies in the contemporary world (Denis Vidal)
Uses of the internet in relation to migratory experiences in Brazil (Dom. Vidal)

Doctoral theses in progress : Reconfigurations of Bolivian Catholic religiosity in situations of migration (K. Maenhout) ; Transformation of funerary rituals in Madagascar (A. Rakotomalala)

Program 3.3. Political use of space, relations of power, and identification

2013-03-20T17:55:25Z

Researchers : O. Hoffmann, C. Poiret, C. Médard, G. Schlemmer
Associated researcher : C. Agudelo
Doctoral student : J. Corredor

This program examines the modalities of appropriation and control of spaces, by integrating the dimension of identity that can exist, without necessarily attributing a fundamental role to it. This should allow us to evaluate the articulations between different modes of identification and to better evaluate the processes of designation of territories and identities, the mechanisms of domination and the instruments of control, but also those of resistance to control, of subversion of imposed models and strategies of escaping or avoiding these norms. The relation between assumed ethnicity and territory is at the heart of national pacts between governments and groups that are sometimes qualified as “minorities”. Next to these approaches – which are still essential – that underline the risks of territory in terms of imposed designation, of control and imprisonment, we will seek to distinguish alternative practices of space and identity. The ambition is indeed to understand, at the same time, the figures of resistance and those of oppression, to describe simultaneously the mechanisms of domination, submission or revolt, through a subtle analysis of spatial practices and territorial behaviors, while affirming that territorialized practices inform us about identity stances, hierarchies, and power relations between different protagonists.

These questions will be addressed through the following studies :

Ethnic and racial dimensions of land ownership configurations in Belize (O. Hoffmann)
Ethnicity, vote-catching measures related to land distribution and relations to territory in Kenya and Uganda (C. Médard)
Control of commercial and cultural spaces through the ethnic presentation of security personnel in France (C. Poiret)
Forms and age of territorialization in the definitions of identity in the Phongsaly province of Laos
Relationship to territory in a context of exacerbated mobility : the Garifunas in Central American and the United States (C. Agudelo)

Doctoral thesis in progress : Declared ethnic belonging and access to land in Colombia (J. Corredor)

Program 3.2. Anthropology of extreme exile

2013-03-20T17:53:28Z

Researcher : M. Hovanessian

This program aims to apprehend the resistant subjectivities, or spaces of subjectivation, in which state sponsored violence has produced the erasure of “anthropological places”, to be understood as places invested with the power to “reflect on place”, where the everyday life of a group becomes entwined with lineage, filiations, transforming the geographic place into a territory of ritualized, symbolized life. An anthropology of extreme exile inevitably combines an anthropology of modern violence and of national collective imaginings, a notion that invites us to return to the concept of diaspora which elaborates spaces of active fiction. This research involves grasping the content of an anthropology of exile that makes reference to experiences of de-symbolization and that must lead us to deepen the notion of symbolic field, and to distinguish symbols.

These questions will be addressed through the following studies :

« Communties born from political denial » (Armenian exile, Jewish exile, Romani “nation”)
Work on disappearance in the Argentine context

Program 3.1. “Recurrences of slavery”

2013-03-20T17:51:40Z

Researchers : M-P. Ballarin, G. Bonacci, M-J. Jolivet

Here we will be interested in the heritage of slavery in the contemporary period, in the long term repercussions of a forced migration, that of the slave trade, and in the contemporary recompositions of society and identity born of these changes.

Taking into account the enduring strength of the status of slave, which has become a social category that is often concealed, allows us to envision the permanence of its effects in the social and economic fields. Today, ignoring the composition and internal hierarchy of populations results in addressing them messages, subsequently, that can neither be understood nor have an impact. Several aspects emerge here such as the analysis of the context of production of the category slave/descendent of slaves ; reminiscences of former relations of dominance ; the socio-economic issues that ensue in terms of access to resources ; political struggles through narratives that are elaborated from discourse and historic events ; the use of ethnic and racial identities in social claims-making ; the reconfigurations of relationships to culture and to history ; and finally, the patrimonialization of these identities according to political and social aims… In the contemporary period, what becomes, in reality, of liberated slaves and their descendents, considered to be without either ancestors or land, or, alternatively, cut off through a new migration from ancestral lands that are recreated in situations of resistance or flight ? What are their social positions ? What images do they themselves convey, and how are they perceived by others ? Today what does this status – former slave – consist of, and how is it negotiated ? What strategies can we perceive, whether they be part of a strategy of concealment or, on the contrary, one of display, even claims-making ? What are the formal and informal discourses that are transmitted in the villages and urban neighborhoods known for housing servile populations ? The study of the narratives, the places and the figures associated with slavery and slave resistance, of the state of these memories – between the opposite poles of publicized memories and concealed memories – is determinant, in particular when the fruits of such analysis become a resource in identity politics.

This question will be addressed through the following research :

The effect of slavery and the slave trade on contemporary Kenya (M-P. Ballarin)
The return of descendents of slaves to Ethiopia : discourse and social practices (G. Bonacci)
Modalities of change among the runaway slaves of Westen French Guyana (M-J. Jolivet)

Program 2.3. Ethnic and racial group formation, discriminatory processes

2013-03-20T17:47:03Z

Researchers : A. Rabaud, Y. Gastaut, M. Cognet, P. Cuturello, J.-L. Primon, C. Poiret
Associated researchers : V. De Rudder, M. Eberhard, M. Manier
Doctoral students : E. Adam Vesina, R. Braud, M. Duclos, C. Gabarro, J.-M. Huctin, N. Puvilland, J. Scheepers, Y. Tahata, D. Trawale

Racism is considered one of the forms that interethnic social relations can take. The research projects in this program question the practical modalities of racism through processes of discrimination and segregation. They shed light on an on-going dynamic – the construction, crystallization, weakening, and displacement – of the borders between Us/Them, and, furthermore, the variable and multiple variables of the articulation between difference/inequality, which is at the very heart of racist ideologies and practices.

The question of discrimination is central to this research program. It can be the point of entry for a number of analyses – the differential treatment of individuals in the fields of education, work, housing, or health, sense of injustice experienced by individuals… Specific attention will be paid to daily forms of resistance among populations of minority status, and to the strategies of actors confronted with discrimination : how do they interpret these processes, adapt to them, and seek to resist them ? What responses do they develop in order to denounce discriminatory situations ?

Research on these questions is centered on empirical analysis of the lived experience and perception of discriminations on the basis of origin, whether this origin is real or presumed. It examines individual and collective processes of realization of discrimination as well as the consequences of this awareness on individual life paths and on the strategies developed by social actors confronted with this reality.

In addition, other research projects will study the articulation of social relationships of domination. The analysis of power relations based on « race » and on gender has helped to shed light on the uniqueness of the social processes of construction and naturalization of “difference”. This research is now confronted with the necessity of reflecting on this intersectionality of diverses modes of unequal social classifications, in particular those which are constructed, ideologically and in practice, in terms of class, gender, and “race”, without taking into consideration age, generation, or sexual orientation.

Finally, even if the development of research on “majority” social groups is still in its beginnings in France, some projects focus on the modalities of construction of the category “White” and “French”, and on the dynamics of categorization and different registers of identification involved.

These questions will be addressed through the following studies :

Racism and anti-racism : a historical approach to public and academic debates (Y. Gastaut)
Anti-Arab racism and Anti-Jewish racism in France : articulation and accumulation (V. De Rudder)
Measuring and quantifying racism (J-L Primon)
The family as a space of experiencing racism in France : questioning the articulation of race, gender, class, generation (A. Rabaud – M. Eberhard)
Analyzing the combination of social relationships of power through biographical narratives (Poiret)
The health of aging women : analyzing racist and sexist discrimination and interrogating the articulation of origin, gender, class, and age/generation (M. Cognet)
The production of “whiteness” through media discourse (C. Poiret)
Reflection on the complemental nature of methods of recording racism and discrimination through analyss of the TEO study in France (M. Eberhard)
Analysis of the lived experience of discrimination through the DRIS study (P. Cuturello)

Doctoral theses in progress : Migrant trajectories and therapeutic treatment of African migrants living with HIV-Aids and/or tuberculosis in France and Canada (E. Adam Vezina) ; Construction of categories of otherness in public health : the case of medical treatment of type 2 diabetes (R. Braud) ; The faults of marginalization : the flea market at Porte Montmartre (M. Duclos) ; Access to medical treatment among irregular immigrants in France (C. Gabarro) ; Intertwined power relations : “racialized gays” in France (D. Trawale) ; The political implication of minority elites : towards an empirical approach to intersectionality (N. Pullivand) ; Institutional construction of the category “French” (Y. Tahata) ; Constructions of ethnicity in the workplace in France (J. Scheepers)

Program 2.2. Immigration and minority situations : policy, discourse, and mobilizations

2013-03-20T17:44:55Z

Researchers : E. Cunin, G. Frigoli, Y. Gastaut, G. Ivaldi, C. Médard, A. Morice, A. Rabaud, J. Streiff-Fénart
Associated researchers : A. Berghamaschi, J. Gartner, M. Manier, M. Nayrac
Doctoral students : M. Clergeau, C. Gourdeau, Im Ahn Bak Ne, M. Lejeune, P. Montvalon, M. Petitjean, H. Sanders

The enduring establishment, in Europe in particular, of the “question of immigration” in the public arena provides another framework for deciphering the experiences and practices of production and management of otherness, from a historical point of view as well as through a contemporary approach, combining macro- and micro-sociological levels.

The first part of this program examines, in a broad sense, the construction and the problematization within the public sphere of issues related to otherness : “immigrants”, of course, but more generally, ethnic, religious, cultural, national identity of groups construed as minorities, considered as the result of dynamic process of social, historical, and political construction. Immigrants, indigenous or autochtone peoples are, according to each case, “groups” whose placement in a minority situation creates a problem. Their categorization defines them as political « objects » of both public action (politics) and of discourse and methods of management (policy). From a historical angle, these processes of creation of otherness can be perceived in the diffusion and the persistence of constructed images, prejudice, and stereotypes associated with immigration in political space and in the media. The research program ECRIN (Screens and Inequality) : “Arabs in French media from 1963 to the present”, coordinated by URMIS and in which several researchers of the department participated, aims precisely in studying constructed images visible in television and cinema.

As legitimate agents of categorization, the State and its diverse institutional ramifications play a fundamental role on the national level. The effects of the reorientation of migratory policy can also be perceived on the local level through the analysis of the definition, implementation and evaluation of public action, on the one hand, and of modes of political management of cohabitation between indigenous peoples and immigrants and/or minority groups, on the other. This analysis includes a large range of producers – leaders, political movements, interest groups, medias, institutional actors, residents, professionals in the sectors of social work, culture, or education - , as well as a multitude of modes of production or local uses (discourse, legislation, daily demonstrations, implication in non-profit groups). Another strand of research will focus its attention on the actions that dispute unequal social orders brought about by these classifications, the arrangements and resistances offered by actors in collective mobilizations, which generate identities and forms of otherness, intending to transform minority situations.

These questions will be addressed through the following studies :

Issues of immigration and « de-radicalization » of extreme right parties and right-wing populist parties in Europe (G. Ivaldi)
The platform of extreme right parties in France (G. Frigoli)
The evolution and historical foundation of immigration policies in France (J. Streiff-Fénart)
New concerted policies of border control (A. Morice)
Ethnic voting and political violence in Kenya and in Uganda (C. Médard)
Inter-minority relations in French urban space (A. Rabaud)
Policies of parental aid in local public action (M. Manier)
Nation building, migrations, and otherness in Mexico and Central America (E. Cunin)
The gendered representation of « the Arab » in French audiovisual media (M. Manier)
The treatment of otherness in French media (G. Frigoli)
Mainstream music and immigration in French media (Y. Gastaud)
The modification of the image of Maghrebi immigration transmitted in French televisione (J. Gartner et M. Nayrac)
The construction of « Arabness » through images in France (A. Berghamaschi)

Doctoral theses in progress : The integration contract for immigrants in France (C. Gourdeau) ; La reference to Islam in collective Maghrebi struggles in France (M. Lejeune) ; Foreign prostitutes in France (P. Montvalon) ; Social history of foreign atheletes in France (M. Petitjean) ; Social treatment of immigration in South Korea (Im Ahn Bak Ne) ; Representation of French-speaking black Africa among French expatriates (M. Clergeau) ; Urban citizenship of migrants in “immigrant-friendly” cities in the United States (H. Sanders)

Program 2.1. Mobilities and figures of otherness

2013-03-20T17:42:44Z

Researchers : F. Lestage, S. Potot, C. Quiminal, J. Streiff-Fénart
Associated researcher : Ph. Poutignat
Doctoral students : M. Belqasmi, N. Liberona, L. Tassin

The production of new categories of otherness can first be detected in the representations produced by migratory flows themselves. These flows do not only influence mobility, but also modify the relationship to otherness in many sending, receiving, or transitional countries. URMIS's work in sub-saharan Africa, in the Maghreb or in Latin America shows the advantages of analyzing representations of otherness that are directly associated with migratory experiences, and with the status of migrants. These shifting categories redraw the borders of national, cultural, ethnic or familial “imagined communities”, or on the contrary, sometimes lead to individual strategies of emancipation and separation from established groups.

The research projects in this program question the constructions/representations of otherness and the multiple forms of constructing “the national” and “the foreign”, in sending countries as well as in receiving countries. A heuristic means of approaching the collective imaginings and the representations of the migratory experience is to examine the vernacular or vernacularized lexical categories that have been used or are used to enunciate the act of leaving, the migratory voyage ; to designate, distinguish and name emigrants according to various destinations and localizations, and different statuses as migrants – students, manual laborers, elite athletes, intellectuals, artists, politicians, individuals born within a diaspora. The projects brought together in this program address the problem of figures of otherness as it is related to obstacles to mobility and the processes of categorization and criminalization of groups that emerge and circulate between spaces of emigration and spaces of immigration.

One part of the research deals with new figures of otherness in West Africa, in the Maghreb and in Latin America by questioning the way that the home societies of migrants perceive the status of “the undocumented” and the reintegration of the deported ; the situations of social disintegration, in the zones of departure, that is caused by the regulations that preside over North-South circulations and their effects of disaffiliation from national, local, and familial forms of belonging ; attempts to transform ties of solidarity and mutual aid between migrants in the form of collective organization that manifests itself in public space.

Other research focuses on the production of new categories of marginality (“undocumented”, “illegal”, “detained”, etc.), that embody the limits between inclusion in and exclusion from the government.

These questions will be addressed through the following studies :

Associations of deported migrants in Senegal, Mauritania and Mali ((J. Streiff-Fénart et Ph. Poutignat)
Young deported Tunisian migrants (S. Potot)
Redefinition of the migratory question in Mali (C. Quiminal)
The question of migrant aide in Mexico (F. Lestage)

Doctoral theses in progress : the social question of Peruvian migrants in Chili (N. Liberona) ; migrations of Central and Eastern European Roms (M Belqasmi) ; the production of marginality through European migratory policies and in methods of border security in France, Italy, and Greece (L. Tassin).