Scholars have distinguished the process of migration into three stages: (1) pre-migration, (2) transit, and (3) post-migration in order to understand what migrants experience at different stages of migration. But can these experiences be captured as an “event-of-transit,” which has an identifiable structure of “pre-migration” and “post-migration?” Drawing on empirical explorations in African, European, and American contexts, this session problematizes reductionist understandings of migration. Covering the actual and aspirational movements of people, it opens up new vistas on the intersection of religion and migration through liberationist, abolitionist, and gender perspectives.
Research on religion and migration suffers from a parochial focus on the religious lives of people who physically move across state borders. Developing an alternative framework of migration as a matter of who you are, not where you are, this paper reconfigures the “stages of migration” discourse from an emphasis on physical mobility to matters of personhood and identity. It draws insights from online surveys (N=650), interviews (50), and ethnographic observations of Ghanaian aspiring migrants to examine how religion—particularly in Pentecostal-Charismatic forms—enables people to embody migration without physical mobility across state borders. While migration aspirations might never be realized, mobility materializes in people’s bodies and emotions through religious experiences such as dreams, visions, prophecies, and divinely attributed intuitions. These religious experiences contribute new insights into the psychological modes of human migration that problematize the emphasis on place utility in conventional notions of "stages" of migration.
“Abolition and Faith” tracks the violent histories that have produced racialized and gendered representation in the neoliberal immigrant rights movement, while identifying and examining the formation of what this project calls “migrant liberation narratives”—the narratives of those in immigrant detention centers or migrants impacted by detention—that produce alternative, and oftentimes, liberatory understandings of border politics, criminalization, migration, and faith. Employing an abolitionist framework, I consider how calls to “abolish ICE” rely on the language and goals of “abolition,” but fail to consider how contemporary anti-immigrant practices of incarceration, detention, deportation, policing, and surveillance are rooted in the histories and legacies of racial chattel slavery and the forced transatlantic trafficking of African Diasporic and Indigenous peoples. Against these racialized logics, I argue that notions of faith and the sacred play a crucial role in determining how detained migrants construct their understandings and visions of liberation.
Refugees and migrants are exposed to sexual violence throughout their journey. Nationalist concepts are invoked – exploiting the vulnerability of “women” to protect a “national collective”. Debates charged with racism and sexism fall on fertile ground at a time of a global shift to the right. Particularly problematic is the attitude towards LGBTIQ+ persecution and the non-recognition of sexual violence as reason for asylum. Some of the flight and migration discourses reveal a lack of understanding of the effects of sexual and gender-based violence. The presentation scrutinizes epistemological premises; the ‘Cologne Event’ in the migration debate; Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine; flight and migration from Ukraine and beyond; agency and human flourishing in postmigrant societies. Questions of belonging, exclusion and integration polarize entire societies. Postmigrant concepts evoke a reordering of established privileges, structures, and migrants’ rights. “Post” in postmigrant is not a temporal prefix – it means looking behind the migration narrative.
In the spring of 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, local initiatives in a small town in Värmland, Sweden, made it possible for three buses of refugees from Ukraine, mainly women and children, to reach Sweden. The local initiatives were made by relatively small and diverse groups, among them the local Pentecostal congregation that has had a long-term exchange with a Pentecostal congregation in eastern Ukraine. Many of the refugees belonged to the Pentecostal church and had visited Värmland as children for a church summer camp.
This paper presents the results from a year-long ethnographic fieldwork conducted among Pentecostal refugees from Ukraine, focusing on religious practice and support structures. In order to shed light on refugees from Ukraine in 2022, intersectional variables are used in a comparison with the experiences from migrants, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, who arrived in Sweden after 2015.