Migration Blueprints of Immobile Actors. Desires, Discourses and Practices of Male Juveniles in the Port City of Mahajanga / Madagaskar

• Applicant: Professorin Dorothea E. Schulz, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 219941374

The project investigates visions of and expectations toward migration formulated by educated male university students and graduates in the cosmopolitan Malagasy port city Mahajanga. Drawing on biographical interviews and related empirical methods, the project will analyze norms, values and institutions that inform students’ visions and projects of migration. The project thereby combines a historical perspective on migration with an assessment of actual and future-oriented practices and imaginations of migration. Of key import is a closer understanding of changes in patterns since independence (1960). The project proposes an innovative theoretical perspective on and methodological approach to the study of (im-)mobility, tying an analysis of changing constructions of masculinity and youth to explorations of the constitutive role of media consumption for migration patterns and practices.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants