Picturing Women: Identity, Power, and Photographies in Urban Nigeria

In urban Nigeria, the profile of photography as an art form is on the rise and the work of female artists is coming to global attention. This article argues for a more nuanced analysis that reflects on image objects that ‘speak back’ to issues of inequality and challenge center/periphery sightlines that remain salient within a transnational, interconnected ecosystem. ‘Picturing women’ alludes to the active intersection of the feminine as framed identity within a context of unequal power relations at the global and local level. Through the prism of three key pieces from artists Ndidi Dike, Adeola Olagunju, and Jumoke Sanwo, based in Lagos, Nigeria, I trace the use of lens-based media within their respective practice. What emerges is the relevance of enduring ways of seeing and being from a local ethnographic context that challenge the powerlessness discourse that so often frames visions of Africa. The concept of ‘impaired citizenship’ from the work of theorist Ariella Azoulay provides a helpful provocation to think about the particularities of place that photography unsettles to propose connectivity beyond borders. In conclusion, the article calls for more critical engagement with discursive questions of difference to counter persistent opacities and silences

Citizens of Photography: The camera and the Political Imagination

Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination is an empirical anthropological investigation of a hypothesis about the relationship between photographic self-representation and different societies' understanding of what is politically possible

THE MYTH OF SELF RELIANCE: Economic Lives Inside a Liberian Refugee Camp. Naohiko Omata. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017

THE MYTH OF SELF RELIANCE: Economic Lives Inside a Liberian Refugee Camp. Naohiko Omata. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017. 194 pages, ISBN 9781785335648 (hardback)

Book review: Integration in Ireland: the everyday lives of African migrants

"Integration in Ireland: The Everyday Lives of African Migrants." Fiona Murphy and Mark Maguire. Manchester University Press. September 2012. --- The integration of new immigrants is one of the most important issues in Europe, yet not enough is known about the lives of migrants. This book draws on several years of ethnographic research with African migrants in Ireland, many of whom are former asylum seekers. Against the widespread assumptions that integration has been handled well in Ireland and that racism is not a major problem, this book seeks to show that migrants are themselves shaping integration in their everyday lives in the face of enormous challenges. Naluwembe Binaisa recommends this read to students of identity and immigration

African migrants negotiate 'home' and 'belonging'

In recent years the volume and dynamics of migration from Africa to Europe have come under increasing study. The resulting breadth of research is impressive and includes such topics as gender and migration, migration and development, refugees and transnationalism. However, this work still suffers from the limitations imposed by existing migration theories that privilege the host context over the sending context focusing on linear processes and bounded conceptual frameworks. Through field work with Ugandan migrants and their descendants in Britain, this paper challenges existing theoretical limitations by proposing an inter-disciplinary approach that draws on transnationalism, diaspora and cultural geographical perspectives on landscape. Through this lens the concept of diasporic landscape emerges as an innovative contribution to migration theory as it highlights the embeddedness of migrants’ lives, within processes of production and reproduction of a discursive terrain that straddles Uganda and Britain. It captures the multi-faceted physical and symbolic impacts of migrants’ lived realities and privileges the continued impact of the sending context, cultural and temporal dimensions. The contours that emerge through migrants’ everyday practices of ‘belonging’ highlight asymmetric power relations. These shift in complex patterns disrupting such bounded notions as migration, immobility, the migrant, non-migrant, refugee, citizen or undocumented person

African migrants negotiate 'home' and 'belonging': Re-framing transnationalism through a diasporic landscape

In recent years the volume and dynamics of migration from Africa to Europe have come under increasing study. The resulting breadth of research is impressive and includes such topics as gender and migration, migration and development, refugees and transnationalism. However, this work still suffers from the limitations imposed by existing migration theories that privilege the host context over the sending context focusing on linear processes and bounded conceptual frameworks. Through field work with Ugandan migrants and their descendants in Britain, this paper challenges existing theoretical limitations by proposing an inter-disciplinary approach that draws on transnationalism, diaspora and cultural geographical perspectives on landscape. Through this lens the concept of diasporic landscape emerges as an innovative contribution to migration theory as it highlights the embeddedness of migrants’ lives, within processes of production and reproduction of a discursive terrain that straddles Uganda and Britain. It captures the multi-faceted physical and symbolic impacts of migrants’ lived realities and privileges the continued impact of the sending context, cultural and temporal dimensions. The contours that emerge through migrants’ everyday practices of ‘belonging’ highlight asymmetric power relations. These shift in complex patterns disrupting such bounded notions as migration, immobility, the migrant, non-migrant, refugee, citizen or undocumented person

Ugandan Migrants in Britain : Negotiating Spaces of 'Home' and 'Belonging'

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Tracing diasporic identifications in Africa’s urban landscapes:evidence from Lusaka and Kampala

The transnational movements of Africans within the continent are seldom conceptualised as leading to diasporic identifications and relationships. In stark contrast, the migration of Africans beyond the continent, which occurs on a smaller scale, is routinely associated with diaspora formation. Drawing on fieldwork with migrants from Anglophone and Francophone West Africa and the Horn of Africa living in Lusaka and Kampala, this paper explores whether their movements gives rise to the formation of diasporic connections that sustain and reproduce identifications with the place and people of origin, over distance and through generations. The analysis illustrates how different layers of ‘origin’ and ‘destination’ factors interact to reinforce or undermine diasporic identifications in Africa’s urban landscapes. The homeland where mobility is embedded in socio-economic relations that embrace transnational linkages may perpetuate connections. The conditions of urban life that impose pressures to remain outsiders may perpetuate exclusion and hinder integratio