You are cordially invited to a seminar titled “Migration and the Future in Post-Yugoslavia Activist Movements” by dr Matthew Porges, which will take place in the series of Tuesday Meetings. The seminar will take place on Tuesday, 3 December at 12 pm in the library of the Institute of Criminology. The lecture will be in English, followed by questions and discussion.
The presentation explores findings from three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted along the Balkan route, one of the primary pathways for “irregular” migration into Europe. Focusing on the post-Yugoslav context, the research examines how political discourses around mobility and migration are shaped by interactions between migrants, activists, NGO workers, and local host communities, and reveals how these groups conceptualize their relationships to collectively-imagined political futures and pasts. By analyzing the legacies of regionalist projects, such as Yugoslavia, the research highlights how historical contexts are mobilized in contemporary debates about migration and political organizing.
Matthew Porges is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. His current research and fieldwork explore the relationship between migration, activism, and political imagination in Central Europe and the Balkans. He completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, focusing on the political legacy of nomadic pastoralism in Mauritania and Western Sahara. He was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, and the Université de Nouakchott’s Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherches Historiques. Since 2014, Matthew has carried out fieldwork in Mauritania, Western Sahara, Algeria, and Morocco. His academic writing has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Current Anthropology, Nomadic Peoples, Democracy and Security, Conflict and Society, Forced Migration Review, L’Ouest Saharien, and elsewhere. His reporting and essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, and elsewhere. In 2023, he was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for a book proposal based on his research in the Balkans.
