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Welcome all. And welcome to our audience. Welcome to our panelists. And special welcome to our presenter today, Julie Kleinman will be talking about her book, adventure capital, migration and the making of an African hub in Paris. Julie comes to us from Fordham University. And so she'll speak briefly about the book. And then we'll have commentary from Lori hain Hart, Kane heart. Sorry, Laurie heart, but you, I was reading your name and the came through me from our own anthro department here at UCLA. After that, we'll open it up to the audience for questions, comments at any time, you can write questions in the chat. Or when we get to the conversation, you can use the raise hand function, etc. So without further ado, we're excited to hear about your new book. Julie, get away.

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Thank you so much for the introduction and for the invitation. I'm excited to talk to you today even by zoom about my book. I think we're all used to these now. So let me share

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my my images with you. I believe you can see them now.

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Yeah, so I'm here to talk to you today about my book and sort of the process of my book and what what I'm trying to do with it. And I really appreciate the this invitation, especially because Laurie was one of my undergraduate mentors. And so it's especially meaningful for that reason. So, yeah, my book is called adventure capital migration in the making of an African hub in Paris. And in this book, I tried to do something, I think a little different in terms of the study of migration in France, which many of you may or may not be familiar with. Sounds like at least a few of you are. So if you are familiar with it, you're probably used to hearing the terms like peripheries, enclave, segregation, communitarianism. These are the words you notice again, and again, when discussing populations of so called immigrant origin in France. But in my book, I'm looking instead at what things like migration, race and public space and its boundaries look like, if instead, you'll begin not with the perspective of the periphery and exclusion. But if a central hub of connection and exchange, in this case, the garden or railway station in Paris, so I want to take a few minutes to introduce you to the station and how I ended up studying it. So I'm just curious, how many of you have been to the gardener? Has it Have any of you? Okay, so at least, at least, about half at least, so you've been to it so you can perhaps relate your experience of the station, to the different kinds of ways that it gets represented and thought about. So like many railway stations across the world, the gardener has long been a magnet for those who exist on society's margins often excluded from full participation in urban citizenship. These populations congregate in and around the station, alongside the throngs of passengers taking international trains and commuting to and from work through or to and from the capital. The station has often been used as an example of France's urban elves, a dangerous and seedy locale where African immigrants This is how it's represented where African immigrants and their descendants were accused of taking over Parisian public space by several politicians who use this kind of language. A former interior minister called the station quote, symbolic of violence in public transport. According to the head of john lewis, which is one of the biggest English department store chains. The station is the squalor pit of Europe, also known as it also contains a literal border. So because of the Eurostar going to London that goes through the station, there's an EU ek border within the station that you have to pass through if you're taking that train. Now in the popular imaginary of many of the sort of commuters from the Paris region whom I spoke to, they saw the station as a kind of an unavoidable nuisance that they had to pass through to get where they're going. However, all of this, of course, does not really capture what the station fully means to the committee, especially to the communities who have defined the area directly around the station, so people who live close to the station. So for example, and I just want to give a couple examples of views the way that it's represented in some literature, the Algerian French novelist, Abdel kodaira, Gemini and for the Chinese of the Algerian retirees who populate his novella God called God to knock. The station is a symbol of warmth and connection, holding the promise of distant lands. So he writes, as soon as they approach the garden Ah, this is the sherwanis. They felt attracted by its warm atmosphere, its feminine forms, and by the soft light that had the color of a good beer. It was the port where they debarked depending on their mood, and their imagination. So although the station reminds them of their precariousness, their, quote, fear of ending up homeless, like all of those on the sidewalks of the gardener, unquote, it remains a mobile home away from home, you fit into lives woven in the interstices of urban life in France. Or, as the writers who can do metta speculates, maybe what keeps the immigrants in the area is the knowledge that the first door to home is just there in the station two blocks away, the energy of travelers is comforting, for it makes us feel that the whole world like us is transient. Now, these narratives and others like it, anchor the station to the immigrant history of Northeast Paris, where it is located.

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Over the last two decades or so, the gardener has become known as a meeting place, especially for many immigrant groups, but especially for Western central Africans struggling to get by in France and looking for work, cash papers, potential patrons to help them and even for romance young, at the station, give each other

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advice on where to find employment. They loan money to one another. They exchange information about everything from the latest fashions to the best ways to meet French women. The many migrants I met at the station often use the word Crossroads to describe it. And for them, it was unlike the segregated spaces of the Paris Capital Region, so often studied in scholarship on migration, the God brings brings together people from different backgrounds. So, you know, one of one of the the Mongolians, who I spoke to a lot and who I'll talk about later in the paper, he used to say we all started out in the immigrant dormitory. And here he's referring to these flights, built in the 1960s in France to house foreign workers. But we didn't stay there very long. He continues, we didn't want to put ourselves on the sidelines. His friend Mahmoud, an older Pakistani man who had been in France for decades, agreed with him. You don't want to be on the sideline. So you come to the gardener. He said many migrants saw the station as a site of convergence of social potential. Lhasa and his peers also said that it helps them to understand and live in what he called the real France, the one hidden by media representations and invisible from the sidelines, as he put it, have suburban housing projects and immigrant dormitories. So how did I end up writing a book about all of this? Well, my attention turned to the gougeon are around the same time as a lot of the French public in 2007, which was in the middle of the presidential election campaigns. During this time, in March of 2007, the station erupted in what newspapers would refer to as a riot. Essentially, what happened was that the violent arrest of a Congolese man in the station ended up provoking confrontations between many of the people who began to use the station around rush hour, and the police and who, you know, who sort of came to the the defense of the man who was violently arrested. Now these conflicts ended up leading to some property damage, you know, and following the event, however, it became this huge thing, which was called a riot. And was, you know, it was referred to as vandalism. And you can sort of see one of the main, sort of Parisian dailies here. lupines Yeah, how they represented the way the way that this event unfolded and who the main actors were. So the three main presidential candidates gave speeches about the event following following it, and they represented the actors in this event as being black and immigrant origin. So an electoral brawl really broke out at this point about what kind of order the French state should have and who could legitimately occupy its public spaces. I think this was a key moment in the elections, and it helped candidate Nicolas Sarkozy bring the debate the debate back to his Cornerstone issues of insecurity, immigration and national identity. So this event really led me to look more closely at the space launching what would end up being more than a 10 year project on the galaxy note. I wanted to know how a train station Ended up being at the center of French public debate at such a crucial moment. What I found was that by examining the station from the perspective of the state, but also of urban planners, of various migrant groups who in some ways really remake this public space, that the gardener I think could be good to think with helping us to think differently about urban space, race and migration in France today. So, you know, if you think about the scholarly context for the study, I think several of you are, perhaps familiar with it. But if you look over the last few decades, obviously, Many studies have addressed questions of immigration, and also public space, rising segregation, urban space in France, we know that French public policies such as public housing development, have led to the creation of, you know, overall, sort of exclude areas that are sort of excluded, as you know, as spaces of exclusion, spaces of segregation, and sort of overall social and economic exclusion. But it's almost impossible to evoke the migrant question in France today, without immediately conjuring up this kind of image. And this is taken from the New York Times. It's, you know, the housing black tower in a gray volume. And this, especially, I think, in the US press, that's what you see. So

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the realities of these environments. And, of course, the challenges faced by the segregation and exclusion, very much married attention, I found that the focus on exclusion and segregation risks performing a kind of scholarly ghettoisation that equates immigrants with these outer cities or suburbs, in the French week, it also tends to belie the connections that persist between the periphery and the center, sort of making this some sort of hard line that can't be crossed. And I don't think you can escape those connections when you're looking at a place like the gal dinar so I set off to look at the station. And what guided me was to imagine this. Well, there were two things, the first thing was to imagine the space as seeing it as the view from the tracks. So what did the questions that I wanted to examine questions of the politic, French politics of difference, migrants, immigration, migrant experience, the formation of urban space, and how migration was related to that, what it all that looked like if you took the view from the tracks, and this is actually a painting called from the tracks of the gardener. And, and that was sort of the one of the guiding things that I tried to look at, and to understand how urban space was produced not just through sort of official policies, and you know, official, you know, political spaces, but also through on the ground encounters in a hub like this. Now, I'm, I'm an anthropologist, and so most of what I ended up doing was participant observation. And to get that this perspective, from the tracks, I tried to, you know, interview people at the station, but I didn't find that that was very helpful. So what I really ended up doing was just doing, observing what people did, and then accompanying people on their itineraries through the station, and around it, but also, um, you know, following the the tracks outside of the station, I also spent two months working as a national railway SNCF intern at the station, a customer service intern. And then I also followed its tracks out whether they took me to immigrant dormitories, to appreciate Metro planning and train architecture firms through the tunnel to London and even on a more of a metaphorical note, to to Bamako and to migrant home villages in the chi region of Mali, where I accompanied people I met at the station. So and this is really the other side of my project, or these two sides come together, which is the angle of people using the gardener as a kind of strategy to deal with increasingly precarious lives and livelihoods. In France, and particularly, I ended up studying West African migrants. I focused especially on a group of, I would say a loosely group of about 30 people, mostly from the western Sahel region, spreading across Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, and Guinea. One member of that group is the person I called last in a picture here on the left is the moral center of my book. He grew up in the Senegal river valley of Western Mali, and this map sort of shows his multi year voyage from his home through West Africa that he embarked on before coming to France. We are adventurers here he used to say that is, you know, not foreigners or guest workers or even migrants, certainly not refugees. Many West Africans I met in France use the term Levon to adventure and leverage your new adventure to describe themselves in their situation and not merely in an attempt to romanticize difficult experiences. Rather, these terms in their equivalents have long been used among West African migrants around the world and signify the idea that migration is an initiatory journey, a rite of passage. Seeing their voyage as part of a broader tradition helped to maintain family relationships across long distances and gave migrants away I found to find meaning in risky travels and travails abroad. So ninka people are the greatest adventurers less than I once claimed, referring to his ethno linguistic groups that comprised about 2 million people concentrated in several countries in the Sahel in this area of West Africa, as well as in diaspora communities across the globe. His father, grandfather and uncle's had all left on adventures of their own.

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In their during their youth, and most of his brothers, brothers and cousins were on their own adventures in Central African Spain. Now, I found this vision compelling in part because it was so different from many of the assumptions of so called economic migration applied to migrants like last night, which assumes that migration is a relatively new phenomenon. In this particular case, of course, we're poor people are forced to leave underdeveloped villages in Africa, and go to work in European capitals. Lawson a rather saw migration as a necessary stage of life and the continuation of a long tradition. And of course, he's not alone. You know, there's lots of work that shows how many West African and Central African migrants come from places where it has been said not migrating is not living. The idiom of adventure is a way for last nine other West Africans to conceptualize their own journeys. But I think it also provides a lens for understanding migrant lives and struggles more broadly kind of theorisation of migrant and now an analysis of what migration might mean, at this railway hub. Last night, his peers saw themselves as continuing the tradition of this of the adventure by practicing what they called the new norm method, which they defined as a kind of an attempt to make social and economic networks outside of their national or ethnic communities.

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Sorry, these are the French terms I forgot to include. So, so, okay, so what I found, through all of this research, I think resonates perhaps with some of your own research, or certainly resonates with the ways that migrants across the world are inventing new strategies to confront increasingly difficult circumstances. Much recent scholarship has explored how migrant communities create social networks and community among co nationals or co ethnics. Such strategies then end up playing into what the French state deplores, as what they call communitarianism, by which they mean the way that migrants create enclaves that purportedly bar their integration into French ways of life. In my book, I suggest that the opposite is true. Instead of extending their networks of CO ethnics in France, West African migrants at the gala dinner, depart from their kin, village and communities to create social ties and even families across national ethnic and class boundaries. Meanwhile, it is rather the French state that promotes this communitarianism through racial profiling and policies such as urban development and new legal regulations such as those aimed at curbing marriages between French citizens and non nationals. In my book, I go from the construction of a 19th century railway station in Paris, to the construction of a house being built on the outskirts of the Malian capital of Bamako through connections made at that station. I explore how the gardener gets constructed and redesigned, and then how West Africans use and transform it. I argue that their adventure imaginaries and practices offer a critique of the French politics of difference and the marginalization it produces, as well as an alternative model for how we might imagine what migration management migrant into integration and this elusive goal of what is called you know, living together the beautiful song might actually as the station was built in the 1860s, planners thought to counter the menace of provincial central migrants who had come via the railways to quote pollute Parisian blood, as one commentator put it at the time and I explored this to show you know how the station from its very construction was carefully partitioned, to minimize social mixing and cordoned off the station from the disruptive potential of the surrounding urban environment as its managers thought at the time. From its beginnings in the in 1864. The gardener had a particular status of being a true contact zone, where people from various walks of life and encounter one another, from urban outcasts and vagabonds to foreign dignitaries. Since it was also an emblem of French progress that embodied the hopes and fears of urban modernity. I think this is why it provides such a compelling lens to examine how the state and railways together created and enforced social boundaries, and how these boundaries shifted over time. In my book, I argue that this history illustrates that racial and cultural hierarchies and the sometimes violent projects of assimilation and integration are not recent issues, or somehow problems that immigrants have brought or imported into France, but rather, they have been a constitutive part of the development of French society and urban spaces and of the gattinara itself. Now, as these boundaries shifted, and throughout the 20th century, the station in theory became more inclusive, the 19th century physical separation has dissolved and the station has become more connected to the surrounding area. At the same time, policing and surveillance have exponentially increased, as I'm sure won't be much of a surprise. The gardener got a major facelift starting in the late 1990s, it was a product of a kind of paradigm shift as transportation planners and architects are rethinking how and for whom they designed infrastructure. The design for the new gardener came from two places. First of all, it was the architectural firm who designed it. And then there was the Paris Metro planning office. You know, and I just want to show you a few of the images of how these offices see and represent the gardener. So this is from the the, the metro planning office, and they created this idea of, of exchange. And they were they were very interested in creating sites of transportation as sites of not just physical or you know, the sort of transfer from one type of transportation to another, but actually, of social exchange. However, when I talked to the head of this office,

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you know, they tended to see that I as an anthropologist would not really be of interest to them, because I was looking at what they called marginal uses of the station. And they wanted to look at what they call average users. And he, you know, cited particularly immigrants and Africans as examples of quote unquote, marginal uses, and thus, not sort of the average user that he was interested in targeting with his design. And it's a very conceptual planning office. So what I found intriguing is that the users that he dismisses as these kind of marginal marginal men are precisely those who try to make a meaningful social environment out of the station. It's just that they don't do it in the way that the planners imagined. And one of the architects behind the renovation project said that the station like a transparent democratic public sphere should really be a spatial as a place of exchange, where and social mixing where individuals are not segregated by their modes of transport. You know, personally, using this kind of public sphere almost habermasian language. The news station became an allegory for the French republican ideals of the beef ensemble are living together, in which the physical integration of the built environment stands in for the assimilation of various groups into the French body politic. At the same time, planners choose to ignore eruptions of difference, such as those based on race and ethnicity, as they manifest in public spaces, everyday interactions and police practices. So, now, let me focus you know, on from the, on the perspective of migrants, which was really a major focus of my book, you know, who so I think, have to confront this space, but also remake it. And they remake an import through their garden or method, that step that sort of set of strategies for overcoming risk and finding success on their voyages abroad, using what they often refer to as the international station to make networks outside of their cannon village communities in France. And they saw instead to highlight the value of encounters across difference. And in some way, highlight boundaries, like race, ethnicity, national nationality, as things that could be productive for them productive of social and even economic value. So the the gardener method is really something I think that they would see as combining the lessons of what they saw as courage and discipline that they learned in their upbringing with the strategies that they learned on the road across western Central Africa, because most of them spent years on the road in western Central Africa before coming to France, as well as the knowledge they gain through their experience in France. And this is kind of a tinkering, I think recolor like practice Where they notice the gaps within the infrastructure of the station and try to fill them in creating an alternative system of relations than the one for which the infrastructure was initially designed. So from a kind of hub of Metropolitan transport, you know, it's the largest railway station in Europe, and the third largest in the world, the gardener method makes the station into a hub for West African networks and value creation. And I track in my book how this happens through these informal money transfer systems that they create their through micro savings networks that they create across ethnic and family lines, which is unusual, as well as providing services where these are there are these infrastructural gaps, or just by creating relations, whether a friendship or romantic relations with people, you know, outside of their national communities. So to put this method into practice, what they need to do is master the formal infrastructure and then re channel it. And I described this in my book as a kind of infrastructural hacking. So of course, this is about not staying on the sidelines of urban life, by reimagining by remaining sorry, not staying in the sidelines of urban life by by remaining in the suburbs and immigrant dormitories, but leaving those places to undergo what is often described as almost a kind of apprenticeship, where adventures learn certain skills, operating in tandem to the work that they do the sort of paid work that they do, in the temporary work sector, what's called intalling mat in France, and especially many of them were in the field of construction, and also

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the station itself, kind of informal, horizontally organized temporary work agency, which was better for them because it was less humiliating than what they experienced at actual temp work agencies, and often more favorable to them than the jobs that they could get through their kin connections and family members in France. So one of the things they also did was tried to spot gaps in information and linkages between the city and the railway station using the kind of know how and social relationships to reappropriate infrastructures. So one example of this is they would they noticed that there was no one to carry bags, all the big suitcases that many travelers would come in, there were no none of those push carts at the station. And so they, you know, a few of them noticed this, they took some of those push carts from they managed to get some reappropriate some from the airport. And then, you know, use them themselves to become a kind of unofficial but more or less accepted Porter, you know, who would take people's luggage to and from the station. Now, I think through all of these different practices, these different networks that they're creating, and this infrastructural hacking, you know, I argued that this is really an alternative form of integration. And I use that word on purpose just because it's, you know, often the key word used when discussing immigration in France. And the reason I argue that is because, you know, the official integration model implies that Africans must leave their own community and values and adopt Frenchness, even though they will never be continued, considered fully French. So this includes acquiring knowledge about French traditions, learning interactional norms, of how to behave in public, for example, gaining the ability to communicate in French are often seen as part of the integration process in which foreigners become citizens, West Africans at the station who really weren't that interested in becoming French citizens, but they emphasize the importance of gaining French linguistic and social knowledge. They don't see it as a linear password installation, but rather part of how they start to expand and multiply networks and social relations. So despite their efforts and deep knowledge of the region's transportation infrastructure, and they really knew the railway and all of the transportation infrastructure in and out, because of the labor market, the policing practices, which are also focused in my book, as well as how they are treated in the French public sphere. Africans are accused of backwardness as overrunning the social order and refusing to integrate and adopt French customs. You know, often their their attempts here were somewhat limited in terms of you know how success for they would be even if they were very good at the outdoor method. So all of the men I met struggled throughout their time in France, going through periods of unemployment accompanied by legal and economic insecurity. The garden or method did not often work to find really sustainable livelihoods. Indeed, how could any strategy really lead to success in such a context, but it did try to recover some of the Lost dignity and to carve out an alternative path way toward real integration, making a small corner of life where these men could patch together a meaningful existence. Okay, so where does that this story of sort of intersecting views? Where sort of history of a railway station in Paris meet the lives of West African adventures? Where does this leave us? I think still in many ways today the gardener remains a place of ill repute, of danger and of annoyance for these so called average users. By seeing the gardener from adventurer eyes however, we see something else. It's social potential for helping adventurers eke out a meaningful life in Paris to practice their own form of social and infrastructural integration into an urban space. And through these efforts, the governor has become an actual exchange hub to use the the transportation planners lingo. Integration here leaves the abstract realm of laws and political speeches and becomes an acted on a public space. But unsurprisingly, this form of integration has been singled out as an illegitimate use of French public space, often by the police, by other train users and by political commentators who convey the message they don't belong here.

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And just a last note, to bookend all of this and bring this final point home. The gardener is once again being redesigned and expanded, or at least that was the plan. Although now it's sort of become this huge controversy. A group of French architects, including john nouvelle have recently come out violently against the new plan, calling it in decent and absurd a plan that would turn the station into a large mall that would look more like an airport and make it more difficult for passengers to access trains directly, and creating a gift for you know, creating a need a gift for commercial interests in a public private partnership redesign with the French retail giant ocean. But I've rather noticed something else about these plans, which I've put here. And the architectural simulations presented for this new design, which would include a jogging track and a co working space. As we see here, apparently, all the new users of this future gardener would be basically well heeled white Persians enjoying some shopping and leisure time, or maybe some productivity before they head to their train. But this is far from the reality that has made the Gaussian or what it is. And my prediction is that whatever redesign ends up occurring, there will remain new spaces to master and new infrastructural hacks to be made. The real exchange of the place making transport into a form of social exchange is not to be found in these kinds of plans, but in the new channels that migrants will invent within them. Thank you.

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Okay, thank you so much for that really fascinating insights into this, these issues that we've been talking about here all along this year migration issues, but from such a unique angle and focus on a particular place in space. So really looking forward to hearing Laurie Hart's comments on the book, and then conversation with the group. I'll just shy, stop sharing. Yeah.

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Hi, everybody. Thanks, Marjorie, David Rodger, everybody, for inviting me to comment on this amazing book. And as Julie said, I'm especially happy to be here too, because of having known her as an undergraduate. She was a beautiful writer and thinker, then and all the more so now, and immersing myself in her book has, has really meant encountering a brilliant colleague, and not all former students. So it's, it's really a privilege to be here. The first thing I want to say is that this book really routes the leader inside the station, and the rest of Paris starts to feel very peripheral. In fact, when we get to Mali, as we follow you to your friend lessons home, we feel the string leading back to the gods, you know, you've made the case very powerfully that we should take this site seriously. It will certainly never pass through any station. I will certainly certainly never pass through any station in the same way. Because my eyes will be different. My head will be full of questions. So I think that is you know, to my mind, the best of anthropology. The special language you highlight is magnetic when your friend lasagna suggests to his friend delay that he respond to rejection from a passing girl with essentially, hey, this isn't your living room. It's an international station. Like take it seriously you French you so called in your so called internationalism. Are when he distinguishes between the weak ties that work inside the station for certain purposes, and the stronger bonds of lasting friendship, using the metaphor of E n versus takeout fast food. These are moments of really magical transformation and rhetorical power. And so one really gets that feeling that that you're talking about of, of casting things in a different light. I've been recently teaching a course in urban anthropology and going back to web Boyce's work on Philadelphia and your insight into migration as constitutive of the modern city and not as peripheral or additive is resonates very much with with his his early insights. Your book reminds us that Paris was indeed organized around a defensive anticipation of the destabilization containment securitization of migrants and mobility itself. The imagined a real threat posed by the savage peasants, the transient worker, the lumpen proletariat and eventually the African migrants. But your God do not as you just showed, and I really appreciated seeing those final pictures too, which are new to me. Your gardener is very malleable in its spatial expressions of these core bourgeois aspirations. We have the 19th century compartments, mentalization of classes in their discreet waiting rooms, and then their collectivization in a democratic great hall for social mixing. But that mixing is highly constrained by the rule that bodies have to move fast and fluidly past each other. And then there's the more recent neoliberal exchange hub that you showed promoting consumption and leisure for the professional urban classes, but on the backstage securitization through both Brut and virtual power. migrants who might have been detained detained from straying from their assigned waiting rooms in the 19th century are now criminalized for staying in place where they are supposed to move. Your analysis of the guy has broader implications for an understanding of border control regimes as well. And I'm thinking about how those extra like mazes of tracks and gates and escalators and levels and doors resonates with Al Weitzman a picture of de facto apartheid in Israel Palestine as a holographic maze funneling Jewish Israelis and Arabs and Palestinians into distinct corridors and levels of landscape. Of course, this is just what they're refusing your adventures. This modern border as a shifting strategy of flexible walls and containment and diversion and strategic violence can be applied at the level of the public building or have the state within this invisible holographic system. The adventurers activate their Raider their own radar of attuned the vigilance as

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the claim that the charismatic Malian Asana makes that he's an adventurer is a transformed vision version, as you say, of the West African flight of passage to confront risk and develop social becoming. This makes both cultural as well as material sense given the precariousness of local West African economies at the moment, and you make that connection strongly and well. You don't necessarily want to reside in those places from which you draw power. I mean, that in some West African cosmology is the land of the dead is the paradigmatic paradigmatic outside source of power. So clearly, you don't want to live there. But most of migration models have a more melancholic gloss to them. And that's one of the things that's refreshing about this book, I'm thinking in particular of the Greek concept of nasutus, in which an overwhelming longing for home seems to annihilate the possibility of an upbeat adventure narrative. So, in the end, let's want to make some minimally effective contracts, continental exchanges and links and I'd like to hear a little bit more about how effective you think those have been. More Time has passed even now, since you finished the book. And I'm curious about that. You do say that the tangible results are ambivalent at best. And suggests that we think about adventure as forging, forging an ethic and I think that is a really helpful way to think about this casting of migration. It's not a mode of life so much as a mode of handling life. So let me just conclude with three questions with maybe four questions that are a little more specific. The first one is that among the most provocative sections in the book is the short part on nationalism and the perils of belonging. And I think this is really good to think with, you know, the rise of what this year calls autox any politics in West Africa, and one could note other parts of Africa as well. My mood among Danny's caveats from the case of Rwanda and Burundi, relating to native and stranger, the Pixi the pitting of native against stranger and xenophobic policies, the expulsion of so called migrants, in times of economic austerity, and the pressures of eco catastrophe are not all recent phenomenon. They have their colonial and pre colonial genealogies. The Ghanaian theorist Otto question emphasizes this for a cry in his recent book Oxford Street. He notes the tension between the so called native God and stranger groups over claims to land. The marginalization of Northern migrants to certain sectors of the city suggests that hierarchical what he calls multi ethnicity is the dominant pattern, while tolerant multiculturalism is confined to specific quasi elite domains like the salsa dancing club that he describes. So in some sense, I am wondering whether or not the adventure ethic is in fact produced by this frame of fixed multi ethnicity of natives and strangers that can kick you out when it needs to. And that this adventure ethics somehow accommodates that. It's one thing to say as you do in respecting the position of the adventurers that they're not interested in mobilizing, but in moving, and that mobilization is nothing without mobility. But it would also seem that the adventure etiology, that they're not looking for citizenship, just the fluctuation between zones is just what the world wants from a guest worker. Both states and guest workers get something from that difference that mobility confers. But it has to be said that it's possible the states get more from this difference. So I'm curious to hear more about the role that Native Claims played for the adventures louisana, as I understand it, at least has a locally quasi elite position in Mali is his attitude towards French citizenship and dependence connected to this native stranger dynamic? How might his positionality and status at home inflect this, how do we set challenging the teleology of the center is narrative alongside this set of ideas about natives and strangers in their interaction between West Africa and France?

43:12

I see I'm going a little bit long here. So I'll be very brief in my two other questions. The second question is a more simple social structural one, which is I'm trying to place these adventures in their social and economic context within the economy of the gods. So on a pragmatic level, they use the station to find wage labor work through contexts and sometimes invent new sorts of revenue on the spot such as the porter Driss was able to do. But how do they navigate the illicit illegal economy? The drugs, prostitution and contraband, etc? How do they protect themselves against other networks? Are they so insulated as they see? Is this adventure ideology, a way of creating a shield or claim that does require recognition by others by other migrants? Or by others who also claim space in the station? How are those? How are those groups interacting, if at all? And then the third question is that in the US, we're more we're more often concerned with this is a phenomenological. Question. So this is about, yeah, the way they the way they'd be in a station in the US were more often concerned with the loitering and turn with a racist history of the homeless in public spaces, the adventures and non homeless, they have apartments, they have dormitories. And I am wondering if you have more to say about the interaction between those different spaces that they do occupy right apart from the guy in any case, but in the in the guard itself. They're not homeless, but they are staying too long in one place, as he put it in a regime that is demanding circulation. So I'm trying to grasp what that saying actually feels like you Acting, waiting, running in place. While five year or euro and others have thought about the time register of poverty as a disposition of waiting Quezon makes the distinction between what he calls free time. That is the mark of the life of the poor and especially marginalized migrants in Accra, as contrasted with the leisure time of the rich. So he calls free time the phenomenological dimension of the informal economy that pushes you to the, quote, recycling of cells, objects and space. In other words, being forced to do something or die trying, as he puts it, which could be a way of describing the suspended and what you call NT to a teleological mode of the adventures. So I'm wondering if you could say something more about adventuring as a different phenomenology are a better model. You caution against casting these lives as heroic, but there is a celebratory language in the way they describe themselves. And is that a kind of phenomenology? I guess I would ask. So those are my questions. I would love to hear more of your thoughts also, on the last point that you made about the infrastructure and the changing infrastructure, and how much you know, the in that sort of you only mentioned DeSoto, briefly in your book, which I was sort of grateful for, sometimes he seems to overwhelm these kinds of discussions. But I'm just wondering about the interplay between infrastructure and sociability and so on. And if you have some other thoughts about that interplay between the form the architecture of the Gar, and its possibilities are kind of Lyford DeSoto debate about the fixity stuff and then mobile people stuff. Thank you so much for the pleasure of reading this book. It is fantastic. It is succinct. It is a great book for classes.

47:10

recommend that everyone assign it immediately. Yeah.

47:15

Thank you for those wonderful comments, Laurie, to just generate such a rich discussion on a rich book that deserves such rich discussion. Julie, you some time to respond to the questions Laurie posed? And then we're getting some questions in the chat. And we'll move to a conversation soon. So would you like to respond first?

47:38

Sure, I can attempt to respond briefly. I don't think that I can do justice to those questions right now. Because, as usual, Laurie, you've brought up, you know, made, you know, incredible connections and sort of suggestive analyses and pathways that I could further explore. And then I haven't thought about before, so I don't, I don't think I can, I can sort of respond to all of that right now. But I've noticed it. And I will think more about it. You know, however, I think I could say this question of ethnicity, multi ethnicity, native versus stranger. You know, I think that's been a increasingly present preoccupation of mine since I wrote the book, especially in my new work, which is more based in Bamako and on migrants and migrant rights groups, who are from Western Central Africa, and are trying to mobilize for migrant rights, while also attempt to do kind of caretaking initiatives for deported migrants, but also all sorts of other displaced people. And these are exactly the issues that they're confronting. And what I find with in their case, is a clear articulation of how the adventure ethic speaks to these differences. Now, first, I think we can talk about the question of ethnicity. And especially in a context where the lens of ethnic conflict is increasingly being put on to Mali, and other parts of, you know, Cote d'Ivoire, as well. So places where a lot of people I spoke to were from, by, you know, international think tanks, European governments, NGOs, who see what's going on as ethnic conflict, you know, increasingly in Mali, and an even as you know, potential, having a potential for genocide was one of the recent reports I saw. You know, which, to me is a very dangerous narrative, to be imposing on a place where that was not the case. And I think it actually risks making it the case, because groups who lack resources, see the potential for making ethnic based claims they can get European, especially French attention, by me making claims based on ethnicity. So I think this is a very complex set of issues right now that are urgent to to address now, in the context of my work here. What I find, especially having done this more recent work, is that this notion of being an adventurer, and of the connections that adventures make across national boundaries, across ethnic boundaries, they still use ethnic national boundaries. So they're still important, as I express in the book, there's all sorts of ways that, you know, ethnic, ethnic boundaries are constituted in these interactions and are so critical to these interactions. And, you know, one of the key things I wanted to illustrate was how, you know, these notions of who they were in who they were becoming as adventurers were constituted in these boundaries and and in these interactions. The adventure ethic in the case of migrant mobilization becomes a way of challenging, I think nationalism. And this becomes more clear in the case of the activists that I'm working with now in Bamako who are going against the kind of Zena phobic narratives that exist around the African continent now as well. And trying to make a claim for a broader or not even I wouldn't say broader, but for a different mode of attachment and of belonging, that is based on shared history, not just of movement, and mobility, which is really important, going back to pre colonial movement in mobility, but also a shared history of being displaced and of, of moving, of not being allowed to move. So sort of that shared history of deportation becomes the grounds for belonging in a political project, whether you're from Latin America or from West Africa, you know, or from Eastern Europe, this shared history of deportation and displacement can become the grounds for movement. And that is what is challenging. The rising sort of Zena phobic sort of ethnic nationalism that many people have pointed out are on the rise all over the place,

52:36

including around places where these migrants have migrated to, such as Angola, Congo, South Africa, of course, is often the main case, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, they all have versions of this sort of ethnic nationalism that have risen and in the Malian in Bamako, you know, there's really, I think, they're trying to challenge that, through this alternative form of belonging. And that alternative form of belonging, I think really, interestingly, almost ends up creating a class based identification, because you're talking about essentially a growth global worker proletariat people who want to move but can't based, you know, on their their attempts, these are people who would be mostly considered to be economic migrants, like they're not the sometimes include refugees, but so much of the time, it's about economic migrants, and people who have been deported, because they didn't have documentation because they didn't have papers. And so in many ways, this is this particular class. And as you point out as well, this class, and I think this is supported by this notion of being an adventurer. And, you know, this global working class, you know, of migrants is the kind of appeal that they're making. I don't think they don't state it quite that way. But when I see them interacting with people from different places, that's sort of the tenor that it takes on. And I'm still thinking about that. But that's sort of one of the main things I've seen. And I think that also speaks to your other point about sort of lost his position or in general their positions within where they came from. Now, he, he refers to him as a noble in this sort of caste system that still exists. In and it's not like a caste system, like in India, it's like a, you know, occupational caste. So there's nothing sort of know nothing, that there's nothing in dogmas about it and the anthropological sweep. But yet, he's still, you know, from a very poor rural area of Mali. I mean, you know, with parents who were farmers, who never went to school, he himself only went to Quranic school, so had access to very little in the way of job potentials in Mali. So I mean, you know, he's absolutely still as one of my Malian colleagues would say, on the periphery of the periphery of the periphery. You know, but I think that seeing himself as part of this adventure lineage gives him a different sense of what, you know, his overall pathway in life must be. And this is true for many of them. And in this book, I look at how that, you know, articulate sort of ends up creating social space for them and in a new urban space, and in my new research looked at how it might create the basis for more of a political movement. Okay,

55:30

thank you. So we have two questions in the chat and anyone else can add to the chat or the q&a, I should say, or use the raise hand function. The first question is from Marja Karelia about what about migrant women and children? So?

55:51

Yes, thank you for this comment. Absolutely. I I do have to admit that I received this comment almost every time that I present this work. In part, perhaps in this version, Pathak, I don't emphasize that this aspect, which is part of the work, perhaps more than is evidence about why I do that. But so thank you. However, I think, you know, of course, first of all, you know, we focus on different things in our research, and the gala dinner is a masculine space, and I talk about in my book, how it is a space to find my masculinity. So yes, it's true that women and children as migrants themselves are not a huge part of my overall focus, they're extremely important to understanding, you know, what these people are doing at the gala dinner and how they do it. And, you know, I spend quite a lot of time with their families. So, um, that is just to say that this space is defined, I think, as a masculine space, and many women I know, experience it as such as well. And so I think the lens of thinking about how it's, it's a gendered space, you know, and in a particular kind of gendered space is a crucial aspect to understanding how the gardener works. And I experienced it myself, and compared to confront it in my own research. So that's sort of one side, which isn't quite getting at the question. But the other thing is that, you know, perhaps the the chapter that I didn't really talk about in the book in the talk was, you know, is really about questions of how can relationships and networks get re articulated through through this process. And you can certainly see that in the case of most of these men, including their sibling relationships, which become really important, but also questions of how to raise children who might be born to couples who meet at the gala dinner, that are what the French call mixed couples. And, you know, where those children will be raised, how they will be raised, you know, relationships to in laws, that all becomes a major issue. And, of course, the weight of, of kinship in these areas, because many of these men I, you know, have sisters, or, I mean, many of them have sisters who are currently living in France, who, you know, became sort of part of their part of their story. And again, they're not my explicit focus, because of the way that I defined and delimited, my object of research. And there's a lot of really excellent work, I think, a growing amount of really good work, looking specifically at women and maybe a little less at men. What's really fascinating is that the work on women tends to focus much more on children and the work on men does not focus on children sort of reprinting saying so many of the stereotypes that we have in our own research, which I think is something to rethink. But yeah, I'm certainly more aware of this question, I think, in my current research, in how these spaces get defined as masculine spaces, and what it means to really focus almost entirely on men, because that's the, you know, the presence of what it means to be an adventurer is absolutely a gendered definition of coming of age, and women were often absolutely excluded. But that doesn't mean that women aren't important to the story, or, you know, I mean, they're absolutely constitutive of this story and of who these men are. So I tried to express that in my work as well. But again, it's not the focus.

59:40

So, before we move to it, we have a number of wonderful questions. But just to play to add on to this and maybe come back to it later. I just makes me wonder about the gendered nature of this cross. The solidarity of working class, Miss or Whatever what you're calling it, in what ways is that gendered? In what ways? Are there more opportunities for the solidarity to be built? Then women may have, I don't know, but also constructions of, of constructions of childhood. And I, you mentioned the Sandra was 14 when he began planning and I missed how to leave. How old was he when he asked me and I'm thinking about the discourses here, of unaccompanied minors and what we mean by minors. And so maybe we can come back to that conversation because we have, I think, three or four. Wonderful. There's another one coming in more questions. So let's move on to Suzanne's question. Suzanne, would you like to come live and pose it yourself? And I think we can allow you to do that. I'm not sure the technology. Or I can read it. Suzanne says thanks for a lively informative talk. Oh, nope. Yep, Here she comes. You can speak for yourself, Suzanne.

1:01:01

I sent it to you. So now I can't read it. Why don't you read it? Totally.

1:01:07

Thanks for a lively informative talk. Do you know anything about the experiences of the n ds, migrants from the French West Indies, you stress that French whites feel black Africans are not assimilating? What about the NTS who are empty? Empty? Yeah, not not the tears that might be might be Spanish. It's the Auntie Yeah. Okay, Auntie, my French? Do French whites even notice the difference among black ethnicity, quote unquote ethnicities?

1:01:38

Well, this is a great and very complex question. And, you know, there are some, you know, there, there are a lot of scholars who've examined specifically the question of blackness in France, and how it sort of gets divided along these lines of African and all to you. And so I'm not going to speak to all of those issues, but I will speak to how it appeared in my own research, which is that these borders became very important to impart to these West Africans who I spoke with, and they found that the borders between, you know, themselves and an anti EU, but also other other forms of what they saw, of what they, you know, they said that, you know, the French police, and they often refer to the French police as thinking this, the French police is thinking that, and many times that was sort of a shorthand, I think for like the French in general, but you know, the sort of the state, right, because the police are the ones they interact with frequently. And so, you know, they would say things like, you know, the French police sort of see us as all the same, they don't see the different iterations of blackness. And whereas we're, this is, these are totally different. And so the difference between sort of Africans and people of African origin and on ta is one of the main dividing lines that they saw. And there's even sort of a movement where, you know, one guy or the gal dinar tells not to me, but to a French journalist, that, you know, that he, he said, the gal dinner is for en ta e and T i ers holes is that which means, like, the whole thing, versus and not on t u, which prominence on T versus on T you words that sound very similar to each other. So, meaning that, you know, on, on TA, we're not holes, whole Africans, but, you know, again, based on their history, not quite as whole as onto you. And so and whereas there's a different station, which is Leon shadley layout, which is for the en TA. So there's also this question of, of different kinds of urban territory as it maps on to forms of blackness in France. And, you know, they also were very critical of the Caribbean, French Caribbean, police officers who they thought were particularly hard on them, and particularly racist towards them as Africans. And, you know, again, this is their sort of articulation of it, of how of how these differences work. So I think this is a this is a complex issue, but I just want to point out that it it's a very important sort of social question that gets replayed in their interactions with the with the police, sometimes with each other and then the other main difference was this difference, this boundary between what they call lib Liga la Hoon, WA, lib Blader being country like which is basically a word for a country bumpkin, right I mean, it's a it's almost like a, I think a bit of a pejorative term. And the Hoon, wah, which is the sort of the slang and version slang for black Um, who they saw as people who were born in France, so they might be of African origin, but they were born in France, versus them who came from the blood who came from. And of course, this is a wonderful like Arabic, French hybrid word that that's being used and then sort of reformed to define themselves. So this becomes a really important distinction for them. And again, they criticize the police for not being able to see these distinctions. So I think those are I can't speak to all of the ways that this comes up in general in France. But this is the ways but these issues that are better at the core of your question, I think came up in my own research. Thank you. Okay, I'm trying to keep the order. But I'm not sure I've got it right. I think Hiroshi has had his hand up. So we'll invite Hiroshi in. And then I think we'll follow with cuts Arya and Jonathan No. and Judy Hillman had a question in the chat. So they come in, in in different forms. Different. Yeah. Hiroshi, come on here. And then Jonathan? Yep, you're here. We hear you. Okay, I'm not sure I turn my camera on. All right. All right. Okay.

1:06:30

I've got the wrong camera, camera going here. But, you know, this, this gets into some things that I don't think you talked to talk about in the in your talk, but maybe while being the book. And so it may just be question of direct me to where in the book, but a couple things that you fall in the category of government interventions. And you were speaking to some extent about what's going on inside France. But a couple things that EU level have been very interesting in this regard. One is they worked with the trust fund for Africa, and the other is a US strategy on voluntary return and reintegration. And what I'm actually interested in is not so much sort of how those up operate in a precise terms as much as what the consciousness is, of those initiatives, and to what extent is sort of an awareness or an influence that those kinds of government or EU EU initiatives are having on on anything on the ground?

1:07:42

If I understand your question that what kind of effect these these sort of EU strategies which try to get convinced migrants to leaves that Europe in return?

1:07:57

In theory, I mean, you could you one possible answer you could give me is that is that it is tremendously influential in all kinds of decisions. And the other is that it has no effect at all on anyone's consciousness. And I just know where we're where we were on that spectrum.

1:08:14

Yeah, I would say the latter, it has almost no effect. In my new research, I see how this works quite, significantly more. What's interesting is, I think, perhaps what has had more of an effect, not necessarily on migration, but on other things is the idea of CO development, which has long been, like this idea that you develop places in Africa in order to convince people to stay at home, which is totally a failure. I mean, that doesn't work. I don't I don't know if I really want to, I don't necessarily want to like publish that. You know, if these places are getting some money, the projects might fail some of the time but they're getting some money. You know, the, the the French have a program for this. You know, most of the people I spoke to sort of make fun of the, the French project, I don't really know as much about the EU program, but there is a the French Office of immigration has this program to where they give in West Africans money to return and then they give them help in setting up like an agricultural business, for example, or some sort of business. Once they're home. These are extremely small scale. I know the, the heads of these offices in France, they're much more discourse than actual projects. So, you know, you see these posters for, hey, we'll give you some money if you return. I talked to the head of this office in Mali, he said they only have a few migrants every year to do it. So you know, I would say relatively little effect.

1:09:53

Okay. Catherine? Catherine. Yeah, it's us. Can you Speak to the differences between migrants who are Muslim and those who are not in in Garay, excuse me on my French, you know, I reminds me when I was whenever I was reading things, rather than saying them in terms of the way they are received their networks, and access, etc. So the question of Muslim is,

1:10:22

yeah, it's a really important question. Almost all of the adventures I know, there are Muslim, and commitment to Islam acts absolutely structured their idea of what the adventure is, in many ways, it's similar to this idea of law and have a long tradition of sort of Islamic journeys. And so I think this is a very important question in terms of, yeah, how it how its structured their their acceptance, you know, I think you would maybe have to look at more of a sociological study to draw a broader conclusion that would fully answer your question. In this case, I would say that in terms of how they're received by the state, their access, etc, how their policed was much more based on race than on religion, from their own experience anyway. The you know, I, I think, in many ways, you know, the Muslim, the figure of the Muslim has been this figure of potential danger in France. But I also argue that, especially starting in the 1990s, into the 2000s, and like, sort of this moment of this, so called Riot being a key moment, we're particularly it was represented as black people, and particularly black men as being as representing a danger to France and sort of occupying this potential danger. While at the same time, you have the parallel figure of, you know, a North African Muslim as occupying a danger to France and to French state as well. So you have both of these, but for these men, I would say in terms of their existence in the labor market, their experiences with police and with, you know, trying to get papers, it was much more about, you know, their race and their origin and about their religion for them.

1:12:36

Okay, Judy, would you like to come on and ask your question, Judy Hellman, or read it, but feel free to come on so we can see you? Thanks for the presentation of what sounds like a truly wonderful read, much of what you describe reminds me of the colonization quote unquote colonization by so called ex comunitaria. of Rome's that's your name. tomini. Boy I'm getting my workout in my language is in the mid 1990s, when I was working on a project framed as quote when an image immigrant sending becomes an immigrant receiving society, unquote. But with one notable difference, which was that the term meanie became the hub of a very mixed immigrant neighborhood of at least 12 square blocks immediately adjacent to the nation, as distinct from the Parisian Banu as the dormitory of the immigrants who congregate. So actually, I see this as a comment, not a question, but would you like to respond to it at all? Julie?

1:13:37

No, I mean, I think, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of parallels. And I've been fascinated by Turner media as well, having been there several times. But just to clarify, I mean, the gala dinner is a very, very mixed space. So it's it's unlike maybe this wasn't clear enough in my talk, but it's it's totally different from the dormitory and the volume. It's it's a very mixed space. The neighborhood itself is actually predominantly, the area right around the governor is predominantly South Asian now, but has hosted waves of migrants and immigrants throughout the entire 20th century. So and they're they're sort of the layering of these migrant trajectories within the neighborhood. That becomes a really important part. So I think it's seen in part as a kind of colonization, or the you know, it's or it's seen, as you know, what someone does right wing politician said, you know, like, I do not say last week, you know, it's Africa. Now they've taken over. And, you know, I was like, well, that's not what I'm saying, I'm saying something different, which is, you know, the whole point is that it's International, right? It's actually a space of coming together of different trajectories. And so it's not the idea of one taking over and if it did become that, then, for example, these adventures would no longer be interested in it, because those are exactly the spaces that they don't see as full of potential for realizing the very different whole process of becoming successful adventure in France.

1:15:07

So I think Jonathan's question might add on to that. And we having some more questions coming in. So as well as just keep in mind, you can put them in the different forums, and I'm trying to keep track of them. While I'm at it, I just want to do a little commentary to remind people to fill out our survey, because one of the things we asked about the survey from this year's events is how did you experience the online presence in the working and even having our absent audience, so just be sure to fill that out. So we can be thinking about how we'll do this next year in the hope that some of it will be live. But back to the questions. Jonathan, if you'd like to come on you, we can see you, but I'll go ahead and read, is the garden or a place with a significant police presence? are more aggressive policing tactics used? Or they just therefore presence and to stand by? What are the police trying to get people for trespassing? And or other charges related to their immigration or citizenship status?

1:16:13

Yeah, absolutely. There's a huge police and security presence. There are something like nine different police and security forces present in the station, from the railway police to the sort of anti terrorism, military forces that patrol it to the National Police, the judiciary to actually there's two police stations, or I think now there's only one when they redesigned it, but basically two police stations within the station itself. And one is a special unit of the what they call the investigative police. And so there's also the customs. So I mean, security is an ever present reality in the station. And so are these so called, you know, what they call identity checks, where they just ask you for your papers. And so it's very clear. And it's actually been shown in this study by the open justice side initiative, around the time I was doing my research. You understand that, that the that, you know, if you're black, especially if you're a young black man, you're about eight or nine times more likely to be stopped by the police than if you're white, you know, and they and they sort of did this, they just sort of tracked this secretively in the station for for several months. And they chose the gala dinner because of course, it's known as a place where people are stopped. And so interactions with the police really become a daily occurrence for many of these men in a daily part of what it means to do the gouging or methods. So it's one of the chapters that I decided not to focus on explicitly in this talk. But absolutely, the police almost become part of their gadget or methods. So obviously, it's a repressive force. Potentially, they could have danger. If they're undocumented, they could be deported if they were to talk to the police. I mean, if they were to get stopped by the police, so they avoid that, using all sorts of tactics. And you know, that the police also become almost part of their attempted to illustrate their own mastery over the space, and sort of show the police that they know the space better than them. And they can outmaneuver them, in many ways. And I think in some cases, it becomes a sort of show of masculine prowess as well, in terms of their interactions with police. So I'm not trying to say that they're on equal footing here. But I also don't think that it's just about this kind of repressive force, it's very much, you know, becomes part of the social world in their in their garden or method. They have to confront the police, they have to deal with the police. And the way that they do is, you know, I think quite telling in terms of how they're trying to get behind the station.

1:18:58

Yeah. Okay. We have Laurie, you could add your question yourself.

1:19:05

Thanks. One of the one of the many interesting aspects of the book that that you haven't quite touched on is the view of the life core, so that the long term ethnography aspect of it, and I was wondering, I think it would be interesting for people to hear a little bit more about the, the aging of the group, they're not old, but you know, the aging of the group and the transitions. And how that view from the life course might inflect the model of the adventure. I mean, if we situated in biographical time as a model, you know, is it a model that is supplies for ages 20 to 25? Is it a model that, you know, what, how do we situate that both in terms of your vision of it as a, perhaps a recuperative narrative of some kind, but also just in terms of their own experiences and their own reflections back on They're there, you know, the disappointment of some of their ambitions and aspirations and also some of the satisfaction of parts of it. Yeah,

1:20:14

thank you. So I, yeah, I mean, I think that that's a sort of Central way of how you have to confront the life course, if you're talking about adventure, because they see it as part of their life course. And they see it as a stage. And they constantly talk about, you know, what came before and what will come after. And, you know, that's sort of part of their mobile orientation to this space, and to what they hope for their own lines, and for their, you know, social becoming. And so, you know, one thing to say is, I think it's supposed to be something that only lasts for a couple of years, but here is where the life course intersects with the political economic reality, which is that increasing restrictions on migration have made it so that this almost liminal period, this coming of age period, that they imagined would only last for a few years, before they would be able to, you know, at least return provisionally and begin building something in the places where their family is, or in the capital cities, you know, where they might want to build a house as a marker of success, they're not able to do those things because they can't get papers, they can't get good jobs. You know, they're in these temporary work jobs that aren't the kinds of jobs that maybe their uncle's, were able to access prior to the invention of clandestine migrant and the creation of migration restrictions. And, and so, you know, this is where I think these two things come together is, is because it's this imagine this is like core stage, what happens when it starts to take over the life course, what happens when the adventure becomes, you know, something that goes over decades, and they're not able to achieve them ability that they want, even when sometimes they do get papers, they still the papers are very restrictive, they might have to renew them every year, it might be risky to go back, they might not ever be able to come back to France. And then in last in this case, you know, he did get this coveted 10 year resident permit, giving him much more flexibility in his movement. At the same time that the economy crashed, and, you know, the kinds of jobs he was able to access were significantly reduced. Meaning that he did not have the same kind of economic or livelihood Kwazii security that he had, you know, prior and, and so quickly, he realized that he had to spend even longer and longer so even as he went back to Mali for a couple of months, you know, to sort of put in his time there, he knew that he would have to return, keep working, and then sort of putting off marrying, having children, marrying someone who his family would see as appropriate. All of these other markers of becoming a man he ends up avoiding. And this was the case of many of the men that I met at the garden or many of these adventures, who are confronting these increasing restrictions and economic marginalization and having to deal with what happens when it when it extends over such a period of time. And this is why it changes I think, when they do go back, even some of the men I met in, you know, in Mali, in these mostly pretty rural areas of the Sahel, who had many of them had been on on a volunteer before, and they almost couldn't quite resettle in their villages because it had gone on for so long, because it wasn't what they imagined because of the kinds of restrictions sometimes violence, sometimes very risky situations that they had, that they kind of continued trying to build ties outside of their villages, almost in this adventure logic that they had, that sort of had just become them on the road.

1:24:00

I believe we have one more question. Michelle, are you there? Could you come on and answer a question? I know we're getting close to our 130 end times while we wait for Michelle? Let me just say two things. Please fill out the survey is Sophie has given you the link to it. So we have a better sense of how you experienced this year's events and what we should do next year. We have two more talks one next week on the wealth of refugees, how displaced people how displaced people can build economies and then we have their final session will be a celebration of UCLA authors. I wish we could have our audience visible to us. But the way we opted to do this format this year we have an invisible audience but many people out there in the audience we also want to remind people we have the podcast of this talk will be available on our Center for the Study of international migration webs. sight so people can hear the talks you've missed and maybe tell other people to listen and go out and buy this book too. Thank you so much, Julie, for leading us in this rich conversation. Thank you, Laurie, for your comments. Thanks to everyone for coming out and we hope to see people back next week.