Junior Researchers’ Conference: Race, Migration, and Citizenship in the Contemporary Middle East-North Africa

When we think of migration, the most common images that come to our mind are that of black migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea or that of Latino migrants crossing the Mexico-US border in a clandestine manner. These dominant images and linked discourses construct migration as a “problem” coming from the “colored” Global South and heading towards the “white” Global North. In many of these dominant discourses, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is constructed as homogeneously ‘Arab’, often acting as a source of South-North migration. Yet, around half of the international migrant population lives in the Global South, with the MENA region hosting around 70 percent of all migrants living in the South.

The Junior Researchers’ Conference will feature master’s students from PSIA’s Fall 2024 class, Race, Migration, and Citizenship in the Contemporary Middle East-North Africa, taught by Dr. Shreya Parikh. In line with the course’s objectives, their research projects will focus on MENA as a site of im/migration. Their projects ask: How do MENA states and societies construct and contest ideas of citizenship and nationhood, in the face of historical and contemporary im/migration? What ethnic, racial, and religious meanings are given to these ideas of citizenship? What happens to groups that do not neatly fit into the migrant-versus-citizen categories? And are all migrants equally ‘migrant’?

Participants (master’s concentration) and research topics

Alba Pérez Marginet (Human Rights and Humanitarian Action) “Religion, racialization and exclusion: Eritrean asylum-seekers at the margins of Israeli society.”
Chloé Breton (Human Rights and Humanitarian Action) “Iraqi refugees in Egypt: invisible, and headed back towards danger”
Clara Abdul Majid Elert (International Security) “Filipina Migrant Domestic Worker in Lebanon: At the height of internal migrants’ social hierarchies.”
Ghada Farhat (Human Rights and Humanitarian Action) “Colonial Shadows: Race, Gender, and Migration - The Erased Moroccan Experience of Indochina and its contemporary echoes.”
Lilou Bernier (Environmental Policy) “The centrality of performance in the experience of queer migrants in Türkiye”
Marina Alda Lozano (Human Rights and Humanitarian Action) “A historical analysis of the changes in the legal categorization of the Sudanese in Egypt”
Nikola Avramovic (International Security) “Sudanese Migrants in Cairo: The Origins and Efficiency of Community-based Organizations in Migrant Integration and Resilience”
Sara Rastegar (Human Rights and Humanitarian Action). “Fragile Sanctuary: Syrian Refugees in Lebanon Amid Crisis and Hostility”
Siti-Ghanyat Abdallah Ahmed (International Governance and Diplomacy). “The Failure of Black Libyan Integration in Tunisia after 2011: Between Solidarity and Discrimination”
Sofia Casiraghi (Human Rights and Humanitarian Action) “Exporting Italian-ness to the quarta sponda: a revision of the Italian settler project in Libya”
Tinka Arlt (International Development) “Sahrawi Migrations – Depictions and Categorizations”