Webinar 1 — African Migration: dreams and trajectories

Date: Wednesday April 28, 2021, 15:00-16:15 WET (UTC+0)

Webinar 2 — African Migration: the making of the ‘responsible migrant’ 

Date: Wednesday May 12 2021, 15:00-16:15 WET (UTC+0)

Wondering how people from Africa are motivated to move and to creatively pursue their hopes and aspirations, even when faced with enormous hurdles? Join us for the upcoming webinars organized by the Moroccan Institute of Advanced Studies (IMEA) in collaboration with Metropolis International.

Registration 

Click here to register.

Description

The African continent has always been a site of population mobility, due to a host of structural determinants varying from economic inequality, environmental risks, social and political conflicts, education, adventure and so forth. In some ways, the root causes of migration in Africa are exactly the same as everywhere else. 

Taking these well-known structural causes as a starting point, the first webinar aims to explore what individuals and families do with it. Key words then are hope and aspiration, motivations, dreams. Those who decide to move to greener pastures embark on an unknown journey into an ever changing environment full of uncertainties, risks and new opportunities. How are they able to maneuver through life and across space by circumventing social, cultural and political hurdles, and by finding the narrow path from one small opportunity to the other?

The second webinar revolves around European and African attempts to regulate these processes. The European Union (EU) and its members states have been uneasy with African migration to the North and aims to intervene in a variety of ways, with unprecedented force, and to a certain extent in collaboration with African partners so as to contain African mobility. How do these efforts, that some see as paternalistic and exclusionist, intervene in the journeys that many Africans are undertaking?

Convenors

  • Loren Landau, Witts University & University of Oxford
  • Jan Rath, University of Amsterdam & Metropolis International 
  • Abdellatif Bouazza, director of IMEA 

Speakers

Webinar 1 — African Migration: dreams and trajectories

  • Nauja Kleist, Danish Institute for International Studies
  • Abdoulaye Kane, University of Florida
  • Lionel Nzamba, Direction des Opérations chez CGLU Afrique

Webinar 2 — African Migration: the making of the ‘responsible migrant’ 

  • Sabelo Mbokazi, Head of Division labor employment and migration, Department of Social Affairs of the African Union Commission
  • Jean-Louis de Brouwer, director of European Affairs in the Egmont Institute and former Director on Migration in the Commission
  • Lindo Oucho, African Migration and Development Policy Centre (AMADPOC), Nairobi

Cohosted by

The Moroccan Institute of Advanced Studies (IMEA), recently established by the Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco has the mission to promote high-level research in the humanities and social sciences and to promote dialogue and interactions with other scientific fields. http://imea.um5.ac.ma/en/home-2/ 

Metropolis International, established in 1996, is the largest cross-sectoral international network of professionals in the field of migration, integration/inclusion, and diversity. It provides an international platform for constructive dialogue and effective production & dissemination of policy-relevant, socially-meaningful, and evidence-based knowledge across the policy, research, civil society, and private sectors. https://carleton.ca/metropolis/