Event: Anthropology Seminar Series: Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands: Migrants’ Journeys through Libya and the Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Date: Thursday 2 May 2024
Time: 17:00 - 18:30
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, Erin Serracino Inglott Hall (LT 1), University of Malta, Msida
The University’s Department of Anthropological Sciences, in collaboration with the Department of Youth Studies, is pleased to announce an upcoming Book launch as part of the Anthropology Seminar Series given by Dr Marthe Achtnich, Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, UK.
This talk introduces Dr Achtnich’s book Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands: Migrants’ Journeys through Libya and the Mediterranean. In recent years, the arrival of unauthorised migrants at the shores of southern Europe has been sensationalised into a migration ‘crisis’. Yet these depictions fail to grasp migrants’ experiences and fall short of addressing a more complex phenomenon. Mobility Economies examines migrants’ journeys and economic practices underpinning mobility to recast how we think of migration. Bringing the perspectives and voices of migrants to the fore, it traces sub-Saharan migrants’ journeys along one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes: through the Sahara Desert, Libya, and then by boat to Malta in Europe. The book examines various forms of immobility constituting the journey and foregrounds ‘mobility economies’: economic arrangements forged by mobility, where migrants’ journeys and lives become sources of profit for various actors. It prompts a necessary rethinking of mobile life and economic practices under contemporary capitalism, and its arguments draw out the complex relationship between the two.
For more information, kindly contact Ms Francesca Xuereb Saliba.
Speaker's Bio
Marthe Achtnich is Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. She is an anthropologist working on migration and mobility. Her research centres around the lived experiences, governance and economies of migration, with a focus on migrants’ journeys, particularly to and through Libya, the Mediterranean and Europe. Marthe’s book ‘Mobility Economies in Europe’s Borderlands: Migrants’ Journeys through Libya and the Mediterranean’ was published with Cambridge University Press in 2023. Her most recent work engages with the concept of the ‘bioeconomy’ in relation to mobility, examining the intersections between migration, economy and health. Before starting at Cambridge, Marthe was a Fellow by Examination in Anthropology at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.
