Afghan Precarity in Pakistan: From legal exclusion to ethnic cleansing

Alice Elliot (Goldsmiths, University of London) explores how research methods and structural conditions shape each other, and what this means for what is possible, and impossible, in the anthropology of migration.

This talk reflects on the intersections of structure and method, tracing how classic anthropological methods shape and are shaped by structural conditions of possibility and impossibility affecting both researchers and the realities they engage.

Drawing on the methodological routes underpinning my first extended ethnographic work on migrations, ‘The Outside’ (2021), I address two core structural dimensions that have shaped the afterlives of my original methodological and conceptual decisions: radical systemic racism in Italy and heightened labour precarity in the UK. Reflecting on the ways in which these structures and their changing dynamics directly impact what is (im)possible in migration research, I begin to delineate an anthropology of migration that positions the relationship between structure and method at its conceptual heart.

Speaker

Image: Alice Elliot