African migratory trajectories across Central America: displacements, transitory emplacements, and ambivalent migration nodes

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Heike Drotbohm
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 406978565

This research project aims to gain insight into the emerging trajectories of displaced African migrants who traverse severely challenged Central American countries in an attempt to reach North America. On an empirical level, the project responds to the recent increase of African migrants and refugees in Central America and situates their understudied experiences in a context of globe-spanning yet lopsided migration routes, crises and industries. On a theoretical level, the project builds on and further elaborates critical understandings of the dynamics between migration, displacement and (im)mobilities. In particular, the project asks to what extent novel conceptualizations of the displacement/emplacement dialectic can be applied to the increasingly drawn-out and volatile migrant trajectories across the Global South. To do so, its ethnographic focus lies on migrant journeys as well as on what will be referred to as “migration nodes” of smuggling, surveillance and solidarity throughout largely understudied yet key Central American sites. Offering an ethnographic understanding of migrant trajectories through these interconnected journeys and nodes, this project contributes to the theorization of ambivalent, entangled, and localized displacement dynamics. By showing what happens before migrants reach the expanding borders of the Global North, the project counters simplistic, managerial interpretations and representations of migrants and refugees en route within the Global South, whose experiences need to be researched in a processual mode.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants