Webinar: Pandemic (Im)mobility: COVID-19 and Migrant Communities in the Global South

Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut Freiburg

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic migrant communities have become immobile – stuck in the destination countries, or unable to continue their journeys in transit or in origin countries. This project brings together a collection of essays that seek to spell out how migrant communities in the Global South, namely in Mexico, Nepal, Qatar, and Zimbabwe, have been affected by, and reacted to the pandemic.

Inspired by a mobility justice approach, the webinar discusses (changing) power relations inherent to mobility, as well as the intersectional nature of migration with inequalities mapped along a global geography of race and class, amongst others. Thus the speakers are acknowledging that long before COVID-19, migration and mobility were intrinsically embedded into a hierarchical globalized regime of asymmetric power, that largely determines who can move and under what conditions. The essays aim to not only re-centre the Global South, but also to view these cases as relational to each other and to the state of global affairs.

An introductory essay offers an analytical framework to look at the effect of COVID-19 on the (im)mobility on migrant communities. This includes an analysis of the deterioration of the already precarious situation of migrants. Moreover, the framework considers in what way the pandemic has become an opportunity for exclusion often through discursive othering. Measures of control against migrants in the name of public health are also deliberated before concluding on how migrants cope with state-prescribed rules and borders and to what extent this leads to acts of resistance.

Panellists:

• Zahra Babar, Georgetown University Qatar
• Anita Ghimire, Nepal Institute for Social and Environmental Research
• Dilshad Muhammad, Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut Freiburg
• Joyce Takaindisa, Independent Researcher, Zimbabwe
• Luisa Gabriela Morales Vega, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México

Moderation: Franzisca Zanker Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institut Freiburg

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