External reviewer: Associate Professor Joris Schapendonk, Radboud University
Supervisors:
- Annika Björkdahl, Lunds universitet
- Anders Uhlin, Lunds universitet
- Sarah Scuzzarello, University of Sussex
More information about the thesis is available in the Lund University Research Portal
Mobility as a Practice: Border Externalisation and Colonial Encounters at the Euro-Senegalese Borderlands
What do we learn about borders and migration policies when we examine them from the perspective of communities living in the borderlands, and through the theoretical lenses of mobility?
This thesis explores the effects of EU border externalisation policies on those most affected by them, focusing on the lived experiences of Senegalese communities throughout Senegal. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork, it investigates how individuals and communities navigate, adapt to and contest the constraints imposed by externalised borders whether or not they are on the move.
Drawing on and contributing to critical border and migration studies, and grounded in feminist decolonial epistemologies, this research shifts the analytical gaze from the border itself to mobility as a multidimensional practice: imagined, embodied, and political.
In doing so, it reveals how the spillover effects of border externalisation extend far beyond individual border-crossers, embedding violence, death, and precarity into everyday life across entire communities.
Yet, it also shows how these same individuals and communities reappropriate and resist these constraints through creative and strategic expressions of agency, making visible a broader range of possibilities that challenges dominant migration and border regimes.