Doing fieldwork on the Gambian “backway”: ambiguities and entrapments in the social connections of the Mediterranean borderland.

Keywords: social connection, humanitarian borderwork, Gambia, backway, migration, auto-ethnography
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

In this intervention, I aim to document and discuss the interconnections of the Mediterranean borderland unpacking the conditions of possibility that shaped my fieldwork in the Gambia, as an ethnographer and former social worker in the Italian asylum. In exposing and discussing such conditions, I argue that the border regime's productive, multi-scalar, and mobile governmentality, while working through mediated and abstracted social relations (Feldman 2011) also accidentally weaves a web of social and intimate connections at/in/across borders (Brambilla, 2015). After describing the genealogy and features of these social connections through an auto-ethnographic approach, I look at how they played out in the field, using them as lens to read the macro epistemic, material, and political relations which organize and hierarchies mobility in the Mediterranean borderland. To do so, I interrogate the ethical and epistemic entrapments they generated while I was doing research on the “backway” in The Gambia (the vernacular name for the unauthorized trip to the EU) and the struggle I and another research collaborator faced to exit the paradigm of “humanitarian borderwork” (Pallister-Wilkins 2016) while living and working through such social connections. In taking these entrapments as an object of analysis what emerges is how the “treacherous geography” of the Mediterranean bordering processes configure ambiguous social relations, which at times bring remote subjects together and simultaneously distance them through the radical inequalities they administer.