Mobility, Empowerment and Precarity in African Migration (International Field)

This field focuses on migration as a form of individual and collective empowerment in contexts of economic and physical precarity. Examining movements primarily within and from Africa, it considers mobility as both a response to and transforming agent of acute socio-political and economic uncertainty in sending and receiving sites. Whereas predominant framings of displacement underscore disempowerment, our premise is that whatever its motivation—ecological uncertainty, violence, poverty, or persecution—human mobility fundamentally represents an ‘empowerment strategy’ through which people actively work to ameliorate their condition. Mobility from and within situations of precarity can transform opportunity structures, redistribute resources across time and space, and generate new meanings that are both intended and unforeseen. The consequences are often far reaching, not only for migrants, but also for dependents left behind and for those with whom they live near and interact where they settle.

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Field Directors

Loren Landau

Associate Professor, University of the Witwatersrand, Political Science and Sociology [ bio ]

Loren B. Landau is Director of the African Centre for Migration & Society at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa). He holds a MSc in Development Studies (LSE) and a PhD in Political Science (Berkeley). Widely published in the academic and popular press, he is author of The Humanitarian Hangover: Displacement, Aid, and Transformation in Western Tanzania, co-editor of Contemporary Migration to South Africa and editor of Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa. His work explores the relationships among human mobility, citizenship, development, and political authority. Along with his academic responsibilities, he has served as the chair of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA), is a member of the South African Immigration Advisory Board and of the editorial boards of International Migration Review and the Journal of Refugee Studies. He has consulted with the South African Human Rights Commission, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UNDP, the French Development Agency (AFD), Oxfam, and others.

Stephen Lubkemann

Associate Professor, George Washington University, Anthropology and International Affairs [ bio ]

Stephen Lubkemann is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. Lubkemann’s work focuses primarily on social and political change in nations that have experienced protracted conflict and violence; on migrants, refugees, and diasporas; on international development and humanitarian action; and on cultural heritage and maritime archaeology. Lubkemann has done extensive fieldwork in Mozambique, in South Africa, and with African refugees and diasporas in Europe and the U.S. His ongoing research includes a project initiated in 2004, with research grants from the United States Institute for Peace and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, that examines the political and socio-economic influence of displacement diasporas in their war-torn countries of origin through a specific study of the Liberian case. Since 2006, he has also been engaged in a major project in Angola, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, which examines the effects of "trans-generational displacement" on gendered relations, urbanization, and informal governance systems. In 2007, he initiated a new policy research project with USIP funding that examines customary legal practices in post-conflict Liberia. Lubkemann currently coordinates the "Diasporas as Nelected Agents of Change in Post-Conflict/Crisis Societies Project"--an international collaboration (Oxford, GWU, University of Miami) funded by IDRC. He also serves a senior social scientist for the US Census Bureau where he co-coordinates a major project on surveys amongst linguistic minorities; and as the interim Director (2012 and 2013) of the GWU Diaspora Research and Policy Program. Lubkemann received his PhD in Anthropology from Brown University.

Research Fields