Projects
Afterlives of Welcome: Encounter, Contact, and Refugee Incorporation in Berlin
In the fall of 2015, Germany captured global imagination with its unexpected welcome of asylum seekers in the aftermath of the Syrian refugee crisis. Yet this atmosphere soon evaporated, leaving in its place a divided German body politic that outlined new ethnic and religious tensions between newcomers and locals in almost every aspect of public life.
My current working monograph is based on three years of ethnographic field research I conducted between 2017 and 2022 with groups of asylum seekers that arrived in Berlin in 2015. It traces the complex and contradictory afterlives of German Willkommenskultur (Welcome Culture), examining the way it became a certain turning point for German society, Berlin, and my interlocutors. I argue that two approaches to newcomers haunted practices of refugee reception and incorporation. The first sees newcomers as threats, moral, physical, cultural and sexual, to the German body politic. The second sees them as potential labour to be selectively and hierarchically absorbed into Germany’s ageing working population. I show how the trajectories of my interlocutors dovetail in and out of these two fields, symbolic and material, as they look to establish interpersonal, local, and national modes of belonging in Berlin. I show how this played out in multiple, and often contradictory ways.
Practices of hospitality were constantly contrasted with hostility and hierarchy. Encounters and relationships between refugees and locals were full of instability, erotic tensions, volatility, and inexplicable closures. If the desire to change and be changed by city life pulled my interlocutors in one direction, the expectations of German economy, and the proliferation of precarious legal statuses began a process of boundary formation that ever worked to marginalise and sequester refugees into spaces that isolated them from the pleasures of the city. These insights address the emergent contradictions that need to be reckoned with, if at all incorporation is to provide a tool in the management of diversity and contact in post-migrant societies.
Indian Migration to Germany
In the last five years Indian migrants have been arriving in Germany in unprecedented numbers. Between 2010 and 2020, Indians living in Germany nearly tripled from 48,000 to 151,000. The number of Indian students living in Germany achieved this growth in just five years, tripling between 2014 and 2019. As of 2023, the 33,753 strong population of Indian students in Germany was exceeded only by the Chinese. This is clearly also a result of some concerted geopolitical efforts - at the end of 2022, India and Germany signed a migration mobility agreement (the first of its kind for Germany) that the current German government says will introduce a paradigm shift in its migration policy, and India is likely to be central to the new framework of skilled worker immigration going forward. Germany, for some fairly straightforward reasons, has not conventionally loomed large in migratory imaginations in India. Indeed when I left India for my doctoral dissertation research, Germany seemed entirely absent from Indian discourse. There were vanishingly few German language centres in Delhi, the city where I lived. Now, there are five such centres on just one street in the south of the city. Across continents, from one capital city to another, a new pipeline seems to be emerging, one that symptomatically hints at social transformations experienced by a new generation of young Indians, who are facing record unemployment figures at home, and a stagnation or even regression of trajectories of mobility. Though the paths from India to Germany are many, two have, in particular, stood out to me over the past few years, and form the basis of my current research interests.
Drive! Indian migrants in Berlin’s platform delivery economy
The first group of Indian migrants that I became acutely aware of were those that quickly became the largest cohort of workers within Berlin’s platform courier economy. Through my involvement in workers movements in Berlin, I learnt that many were from tier-two or tier-three cities and towns in the north of India. Many were the first in their families to migrate abroad. I am interested in what precisely drives this new generation of aspiring youth to leave their homes for German pastures - what do they imagine awaits them, what kinds of social worlds are they leaving behind, who are the middlemen that facilitate and profit from these movements and what does migration mean to those that plan their departures? Further, after their arrival and subsequent incorporation into the gig economy, many of their most important labour relationships are mediated almost entirely through smartphone interfaces. This means that, though they “arrive”, a digital interface keeps them suspended and isolated from the concrete landscapes of Berlin’s social world. Their presence, while hyper-visible, threatens to slip into one that resembles vectors on digital maps. These platforms are increasingly becoming essential infrastructures of arrival for new migrants in Urban contexts across the Western world. Platforms leverage migrants’ ‘disembeddedness’ from local context (and corresponding knowledge of their rights as well as the capability to fight for them) to their own profit motives, while migrants make use of the ‘disembedded’ architectures and interfaces of platforms to navigate through unfamiliar and foreign terrain. What kinds of “infrastructures of arrival” do these platforms represent for new Indian migrants, and how are they implicated in the production and maintenance of disembeddedness? How does this alter the meaning of migration and its effects on labour, incorporation and society, and how and when is such dislocation resisted? What, finally, is the relationship between transience, migration desires, labour, and the possibility of inclusive and shared existence, in Delhi, Berlin and beyond?
Caring Men: Male nurse migration from Kerala to Germany
A second cohort of migrants my work looks to examine has a somewhat longer history in German society. As early as the 1960s and 70s, nurses from the southern Indian state of Kerala came as guestworkers to West Germany. Largely young, single women, their movement facilitated through the catholic church, played an important role in the post-war construction of the West German welfare state, and the Malayali community that resulted from these movements continues to be one of the most significant Indo-German groups in the country. Of course, the shortage of skilled care workers, absolutely foundational to the German welfare state, has not abated. Germany, like other countries facing shrinking populations, continues to import a large number of nurses from the Global South. As for the state of Kerala - after the Philippines, no region exports as many nurses, and Malayali nurses continue to play a pivotal role in maintaining what sociologist Arlie Hochschild called the “global care chain”. What is new, perhaps, is the rapidly increasing number of men entering the profession in Kerala. Many seem to be doing so precisely because of the way nursing offers a viable path to migration - indeed, their prospects within India are, for a change, far worse than their female counterparts with hospitals and nursing colleges being generally reluctant to hire male nurses for a variety of reasons. Thus, and though this has tended to be true in a general sense, for male nurses in particular, nursing and migration form a tightly entangled, single project. One of the many programs they leverage to realise their aspirations is the German agency for international cooperation (GIZ) “Triple Win Programme”, an official attempt to create a sustainable mode of the recruitment of nurses. It should perhaps be noted that, despite producing the world’s nurses, paradoxically, regions like the philippines and Kerala often experience an acute shortage of care workers, a condition particularly exposed during times of crisis like the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
In Kerala the problem of emigration is a more systematic one. Though the people of the region have long been known for being as fluid as the water that surrounds them, over the past few decades, a deep and troubling sense that Kerala is losing its youth to foreign shores has taken root. Kerala’s inability to hold on to its newest generations of men and women is particularly puzzling because, in the recent past, it has been one of the most popular destinations for internal labour migration due to the relatively high wages offered in the state. Male Malayali nurses leaving to become care workers in distant shores, while the hospitals in their homes refuse to hire them despite shortages in staff open up a range of challenging questions at the intersections of political economy and labour migration, on the one hand, as well as masculinity, care and migration on the other. In exploring the (admittedly thus far minor but also severely understudied) role of men in the care industry, my research is interested in the particular complex of attachment, care and migration as a way to answer the question, so often asked in Kerala - why do the young leave?
My work hopes to add to an understanding of why people move, and the complex of psyche/culture/economy that makes up what we understand as human drive. Drive evokes precisely the challenging way in which human action is always the product of forces, both internal and external to subjects, that exceed common sense notions of reasonability or rationality. To be driven represents both the desire to mark one's own capacity to act on the world, as well as to be animated by forces external to oneself. In my research on the movement of asylum seekers and refugees these two elements were particularly challenging to disentangle - a task that proved central to the way the young men I spoke to sought to understand their present lives, and a sense of how to move through the world. A second, related aspect that struck me, was the sheer quantity of loss that migration and flight seemed to be constituted by. The loss of family, money, education, language, context and - as the blue grave of the Mediterranean attests - life itself, seemed to form the foundation stones of migration narratives. So much seemed to be sacrificed at the altar of global mobility - a fact that holds true for the many young Indians who make their life-defining journeys today - that a hint of the absurd began to enter my thoughts about migration: was this so different from what George Bataille saw as the self-ruination of the extraordinary expenditure of competitive potlatch? The centrality of loss in the stories of migration I have been an audience to has increasingly led me to think about loss as constitutive of some kind of psycho-social renewal - sacrifice in the true anthropological sense of the term, or the way in which meaning can emerge out of negativity. Between drive (as opposed to motive) and sacrifice (as opposed to instrumentality) my work looks to unpack the forms of social action and reason that are often left under-acknowledged in the social scientific study of migration.