Roundtable : Gender and Migration, a Euro-Mediterranean Perspective (5/12/2019)
Roundtable 5th of December 2019 – 6 pm at the École Supérieure des Affaires (ESA, Beirut)
Speakers
CAMILLE SCHMOLL is currently a junior fellow of Institut Universitaire de France she is Associate Professor in geography at University of Paris Diderot, member of the CNRS team “Géographie-cités” and a fellow of IC Migrations. Her research topics include international migration; gender and space; urban approaches to migration patterns; cosmopolitanism and borders; gender generation and the family in international migration; qualitative approaches to migration. In recent years she conducted fieldwork in southern Europe (Italy, Malta, Cyprus). She just finished a book (forthcoming in early 2020) entitled « The wretched of the sea. Migrant women and borders in the Mediterranean »
Summary: Women represent an increasingly important share of asylum seekers reaching South European shores. In this presentation, I offer a Social Geography perspective on the predicament of women whose migration trajectories are “on hold” in sites dedicated to asylum reception in Italy, Malta and Cyprus. At the heart of this study lies an exploration of everyday life in accommodation centers, this in-between space which decisively shapes women’s migration journey, and whose significance for both host societies and asylum seekers needs to be examined. Such a perspective delineates the contours of a political geography of bodies, which I attempt to elucidate through a critical analysis of various key aspects and themes. The notion of moral landscape, or moralscape,is used to point to the production of norms and values that define and shape the everyday life of women, including its spatial dimension. A perspective attuned to moral landscapes brings out the ways in which women’s spatial practices, the organization of space in centers and, even further, the public spaces of those towns and villages in which they are hosted, are bound up with anxiety and normative production. Spatialities are intertwined with temporalities – daytime and nighttime, as well as the different hours of the day, which determine the legitimate and illegitimate geographies of everyday life.
ASSAF DAHDAH est géographe, chercheur au CNRS, laboratoire ART-Dev à Montpellier. Son travail porte sur les inégalités sociales et statutaires, la production et la reproduction de ces inégalités dans et par l’espace, et les enjeux relatifs au droit à la ville. À ce titre, il a soutenu en 2015 une thèse de doctorat intitulée Habiter la ville sans droits. Les travailleurs migrants dans les marges de Beyrouth. Il poursuit actuellement ses recherches à Beyrouth et à Marseille sur les inégalités géographiques qui affectent l’installation des déplacés syriens.
Résumé : À partir d’une approche intersectionnelle, l’intervention reviendra sur les enjeux relatifs à l’habiter des travailleurs migrants à Beyrouth. Il s’agira d’interroger la place du genre quant aux conditions du prendre place en migration, notamment dans les quartiers pauvres où ces personnes trouvent à se loger, des opportunités pour dépasser le strict cadre du travail disqualifié pour ouvrir des commerces, des lieux de cultes, y nouer des relations, fonder une famille et s’y installer. Néanmoins, il convient de rappeler à quel point la question du genre, dans un contexte patriarcal et de rapports de domination exacerbés, est sans cesse mobilisée pour justifier la stigmatisation et la relégation des étrangers et des derniers arrivés, renforçant ainsi les inégalités sociales et statutaires qui structurent ces espaces.
Location
Ecole Supérieure des Affaires, Location
Contact
k.dorai@ifporient.org
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n°822806
This conference has received the support of the Institut Français du Liban
