BSAS: Ida Marie Savio Vammen

In recent years, migrants and local populations in so-called origin countries across Africa have been exposed to a wide range of risk-awareness and migration-information campaigns. These European-funded campaigns can be understood as a form of affective borderwork, deploying affect and emotion to encourage migrants to reconsider and ultimately abandon their migration projects long before they attempt to reach European borders. In this BSAS talk, anthropologist Ida Marie Savio Vammen, Senior Researcher and the Danist Institute for International Studies, presents her work with activist organizations in Senegal, examining how activist-led migration information campaigns construct counternarratives and develop action repertoires that are deeply entangled with, and motivated by, recent externalization in Senegal and the EU-Africa borderlands. By situating these "ripple-effects" of externalization within their local contexts and tracing their broader repercussions, her work reveals how migrant experiences, border control, and violence become catalysts for collective action.

Bio

Ida Marie Savio Vammen is a Senior Researcher at Danish Institute for International Studies. Vammen's primary ethnographic research examines the impacts of EU externalization efforts in West-Africa, particularly how restrictive border policies affect the daily lives, aspirations and decicion-making processes og migrants and their families. Her work also highlights how civil society in Senegal resists EU externalization efforts in diverse ways. Additionally, she investigates connections between climate change and youth (im)mobility in Ethiopia. Her fieldwork spans Senegal, Ethiopia and Argentina.