Timeline: October 2022-September 2026
Funding institution: Swiss National Science Foundation, grant number 100017_212265
Over the last three decades, there has been a global rise in the number of forcibly displaced persons around the world, accompanied by destruction and reconfiguration of modes of life. This is not only a direct result of violent conflicts and the securitisation of migration by states, but also a consequence of decades of failed developmental policies, expulsions, and exploitation spurred by the interlocking predatory dynamics of the nation‐state system and globalised neoliberal economy.
The concept of ‘survival’ – as a set of collaborative and potentially transformative practices – might provide a useful lens for thinking about these processes while recognising that refugees and migrants are more than ‘bare lives’. Survival includes practices of social reproduction, that is, the reproduction of labour and of life itself. Embedded in the structures of the neoliberal economy, survival practices are gendered and racialised.
This research project is concerned with everyday gendered survival practices in transnational spaces. We aim to understand:
- how survival is sustained by activities of social reproduction and care, particularly in contexts where it is deliberately restricted and people are disenfranchised;
- how survival interacts with governing structures of states and markets at local, national, regional and international levels; and
- the openings for resistance and transformation that survival practices generate in such contexts.
By positing survival as inherently political, we propose a theoretical and empirical examination of the way it unfolds from the margins, namely in the refugee settlements of stateless Rohingya communities in India and the shelters of migrant labourers sustaining the market of cotton in Turkey. Our methodology comprises a multi-method research design including semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis.
