In this presentation Annika will engage with the question of what role migration researchers might play in creating a more nuanced understanding of the backlash against refugees and migrants following the summer of displacements 2015 in Europe. Annika will suggest that due to its closeness to people’s everyday processes of meaning-making, ethnographic research can play a crucial role in understanding the xenophobic, anti-cosmopolitan and illiberal sentiments that are currently sweeping through European societies. This, however, means that migration scholars need to overcome their traditional reluctance of studying groups they cannot sympathise with.

By reflecting on her previous and on-going research Annika will show why, after a decade of studying refugees’ struggles for emplacement in Western host societies, she decided to “change sides” and study the experiences of people who believe that the influx of refugees is a threat to their values and ways of life. Annika will argue that if we are to understand the current backlash against liberal and cosmopolitan ideas we need to pay attention to genealogies of exclusionary practices, or “cultures of unwelcome”.

This event is presented in person and online. Please see Zoom details below.

About the speaker

Dr Annika Lems is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her work broadly concerns the ways people experience, negotiate and actively create place attachments in an age of rapid global transformations. This has included research on Somali refugees’ placemaking practices in Melbourne, unaccompanied refugee minors navigating the Swiss asylum landscape and exclusionary ideas of belonging to place in the Austrian Alps. She has published extensively, including two monographs: Being-Here: Placemaking in a World of Movement (Berghahn, 2018) and Frontiers of Belonging: The Education of Unaccompanied Refugee Youth (Indiana University Press, 2022).

This series is spearheaded by the ANU Migration Hub hosted at RegNet, in collaboration with the School of Archaeology and Anthropology.

For online attendance, see Zoom details below:
https://anu.zoom.us/j/86557701787?pwd=cnIreVB5eG8vNmlibWtHMjRKaEtIZz09
(Meeting ID: 865 5770 1787. Password: 836061)

Photo credit: By adzicnatasa on Adobe Stock