PROFILE
Jérémie Voirol is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Global Migration Centre. Dr Voirol graduated in Social Anthropology at the University of Neuchâtel (2004) and holds a MA from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2008) and a PhD from the University of Lausanne (2016). He has been an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology and at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester (2017-2018). Dr Voirol has carried out ethnographic research mainly in Ecuador, focusing on youth and music in urban contexts and on festivities and music in indigenous rural areas. His investigations shed new light on the circulation of people, ideas, objects and sounds at different scales, as well as on playful festive experiences, with theoretical interests spanning globalisation, identity and indigeneity construction, sociability, morality, exchange, performance, play and pragmatism. He has published his findings in peer-reviewed journals and edited books and a monograph on techno subculture in Ecuador which was released in 2010, published with Abya-Yala in Spanish and with Éditions Universitaires Européennes in French.
Since February 2018, Jérémie Voirol has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Graduate Institute (ANSO and GMC) for the project “Returning to a Better Place: The (Re)assessment of the 'Good Life' in Times of Crisis” (BETLIV), funded by the European Research Council Starting Grants Programme and headed by Dr Valerio Simoni. The research addresses how ideals of the ‘good life’ are articulated, (re)assessed and related to specific places and contexts as a result of experiences of crisis and migration. Taking as case studies the imaginaries and experiences of the return of Ecuadorian and Cuban migrants who suffered the 2008 financial crisis in Spain, the research contributes to three main scholarly areas of enquiry: 1) the study of morality, ethics and what counts as a ‘good life’, 2) the study of the field of economic practice, its definition, value regimes and ‘crises’ and 3) the study of migratory aspirations, projects and trajectories. Within this project, Dr Voirol will conduct ethnographic research in Quito, exploring the experiences of Ecuadorian returnees from Spain.