Naluwembe Binaisa | King's College London (original) (raw)

Papers by Naluwembe Binaisa

Duke University Press eBooks, Sep 15, 2023

Emigration Nations, 2013

Nigeria has a long history of migration internally, regionally and internationally. It is an impo... more Nigeria has a long history of migration internally, regionally and internationally. It is an important country to research in exploring the orientation and role of nation-states towards their emigrant communities. Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the sixth most populated country in the world with a population of 154 million (World Bank, 2010). It has an area of 923,000 square kilometres and has land borders with Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Nigeria has the second largest economy in the continent after South Africa. Nigeria is also a country of immigration and a transit country for migrants destined for other African countries, Europe, the Gulf States and beyond (Adepoju, 2005a; de Haas, 2006). In comparison to its total population, Nigeria has a fairly modest net migration rate and the stock of emigrants as a percentage of the population stands at 0.6 per cent (UNPD, 2009). This figure is seen as an underestimate because of the lack of reliable migration data within Nigeria and across sub-Saharan Africa more generally, and the porosity of Nigeria’s borders with neighbouring countries. The net migration rate also obscures important migration dynamics such as the high rate of skilled out-migration. These complex movements reverberate in policy initiatives targeting emigrants whose reception sits within a wider debate about the Nigerian state’s relationship to its citizens more generally.

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, 2013

East Africa is the region from which genetic models map the earliest human migrations (Liu et al.... more East Africa is the region from which genetic models map the earliest human migrations (Liu et al. 2006). The principal countries of East Africa are Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda with a population of 39.8 million, 43.7 million, and 32.7 million respectively (UNDP 2009). Their geography encompasses savannahs, lakes, semi-arid regions, mountains, and verdant soils and is home to a variety of people whose migration history is intimately linked to this landscape. Their interdependent yet divergent social, political, and economic development is central to the voluntary and forced migration flows that have marked this region (Gould 1995). Four important interventions have directly impacted the dimension and flows of migration within East Africa in the modern era. These are the institutionalisation of nation state boundaries by colonial powers that in many respects erected false boundaries between people of shared ethnicity (Adepoju 1998); the impact of industrialisation and globalization (Skeldon 1990); conflict and environmental crises (Naude 2010). Keywords: borders; war; sustainability; famine; immigration

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2013

This paper utilises an inter-disciplinary approach that integrates transnationalism, diaspora and... more This paper utilises an inter-disciplinary approach that integrates transnationalism, diaspora and cultural geographical perspectives on landscape to propose diasporic landscape as a theoretical and analytical concept. It argues that research on African migration still suffers from the limitations imposed by theories that focus on linear processes and bounded conceptual frameworks. This paper draws on research with Ugandan migrants and their descendants in Britain, a diverse community encompassing a variety of migration trajectories. It traces the evolution of the concept of diasporic landscape to ground symbolic and material transnational enactments across space, place and time. Diasporic landscape as a concept reveals migrants' textual practices through a discursive terrain that highlights complex migration and integration dynamics through migrants' everyday practices of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’.

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2013

ABSTRACT This article draws on substantial ethnographic data among Ugandans in Britain and Uganda... more ABSTRACT This article draws on substantial ethnographic data among Ugandans in Britain and Uganda. It takes a migrant-centred approach to its discussion to reflect the relationship between assumptions of integration and institutional, socio-cultural and socio-economic dimensions. This highlights colonial transnational practices that continue to inform migrants' everyday lives. The article shows how migrants' understanding of education as a vital component of social mobility and status is attributed to the legacy of British colonial administration. This means that, for Ugandans, the process of adaptation in the UK comes with a different set of connotations, as this heritage remains of key significance to migrants' expectations. Important dimensions to the interfaces between transnationalism and integration are shown to be labour-market participation and immigration status. Place and identity emerge as points of intersectionality where the negotiated nature of transnationalism and integration processes is revealed.

Anthropology and Photography, 2021

...This photo-essay presents fragments from a collaborative project that has explored the ways in... more ...This photo-essay presents fragments from a collaborative project that has explored the ways in which ‘demotic’ photography might illuminate and frame political futures. The project, ‘Citizens of photography: the camera and the political imagination’, is an empirical anthropological investigation into the relationship between ‘representation’ through everyday images and ‘representation’ through politics.... https://therai.org.uk/images/stories/photography/AnthandPhotoVol14.pdf

Photography and Culture, 2020

In urban Nigeria, the profile of photography as an art form is on the rise and the work of female... more In urban Nigeria, the profile of photography as an art form is on the rise and the work of female artists is coming to global attention. This article argues for a more nuanced analysis that reflects on image objects that ‘speak back’ to issues of inequality and challenge center/periphery sightlines that remain salient within a transnational, interconnected ecosystem. ‘Picturing women’ alludes to the active intersection of the feminine as framed identity within a context of unequal power relations at the global and local level. Through the prism of three key pieces from artists Ndidi Dike, Adeola Olagunju, and Jumoke Sanwo, based in Lagos, Nigeria, I trace the use of lens-based media within their respective practice. What emerges is the relevance of enduring ways of seeing and being from a local ethnographic context that challenge the powerlessness discourse that so often frames visions of Africa. The concept of ‘impaired citizenship’ from the work of theorist Ariella Azoulay provide...

Population mobility has played a role in the social and political change of the African Great Lak... more Population mobility has played a role in the social and political change of the African Great Lakes region. However, in recent years much academic research has applied a narrow conflict and displacement frame focusing on refugees, asylum and accompanying governance regimes, with little regard for underlying patterns of movement. This paper draws on recent research among Congolese living in Uganda, Kenya and DR Congo to analyse the aspirations, norms and practices of migration in the region and show how conflict contravenes and overlays these everyday rationales for mobility. While the Congolese are often portrayed as moving as refugees, entering a rather rigid set of regulations and governance structures, this paper shows how these migrants negotiate multiple power structures as they seek ‘life’ – a shifting term that encompasses aspirations, lack of conflict, livelihoods and resources. The analysis focuses on how migrants negotiate, interpret and adapt to multiple regulation enviro...

The transnational movements of Africans within the continent are seldom conceptualized as leading... more The transnational movements of Africans within the continent are seldom conceptualized as leading to diasporic identifications and relationships. In stark contrast, the migration of Africans beyond the continent, which occurs on a smaller scale, is routinely associated with diaspora formation. Drawing on fieldwork with migrants from Anglophone and Francophone West Africa and the Horn of Africa living in Lusaka and Kampala, this paper explores whether their movements gives rise to the formation of diasporic connections that sustain and reproduce identifications with the place and people of origin, over distance and through generations. The analysis illustrates how different layers of ‘origin’ and ‘destination’ factors interact to reinforce or undermine diasporic identifications in Africa's urban landscapes. The homeland where mobility is embedded in socioeconomic relations that embrace transnational linkages may perpetuate connections. The conditions of urban life that impose pressures to remain outsiders may perpetuate exclusion and hinder integration.

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2013

This article draws on substantial ethnographic data among Ugandans in Britain and Uganda. It take... more This article draws on substantial ethnographic data among Ugandans in Britain and Uganda. It takes a migrant-centred approach to its discussion to reflect the relationship between assumptions of integration and institutional, socio-cultural and socio-economic dimensions. This highlights colonial transnational practices that continue to inform migrants' everyday lives. The article shows how migrants' understanding of education as a vital component of social mobility and status is attributed to the legacy of British colonial administration. This means that, for Ugandans, the process of adaptation in the UK comes with a different set of connotations, as this heritage remains of key significance to migrants' expectations. Important dimensions to the interfaces between transnationalism and integration are shown to be labour-market participation and immigration status. Place and identity emerge as points of intersectionality where the negotiated nature of transnationalism and integration processes is revealed.

International Migration Institute Working Paper 41, 2011

In recent years the volume and dynamics of migration from Africa to Europe have come under increa... more In recent years the volume and dynamics of migration from Africa to Europe have come under increasing study. The resulting breadth of research is impressive and includes such topics as gender and migration, migration and development, refugees and transnationalism. However, this work still suffers from the limitations imposed by existing migration theories that privilege the host context over the sending context focusing on linear processes and bounded conceptual frameworks. Through field work with Ugandan migrants and their descendants in Britain, this paper challenges existing theoretical limitations by proposing an inter-disciplinary approach that draws on transnationalism, diaspora and cultural geographical perspectives on landscape. Through this lens the concept of diasporic landscape emerges as an innovative contribution to migration theory as it highlights the embeddedness of migrants’ lives, within processes of production and reproduction of a discursive terrain that straddles Uganda and Britain. It captures the multi-faceted physical and symbolic impacts of migrants’ lived realities and privileges the continued impact of the sending context, cultural and temporal dimensions. The contours that emerge through migrants’ everyday practices of ‘belonging’ highlight asymmetric power relations. These shift in complex patterns disrupting such bounded notions as migration, immobility, the migrant, non-migrant, refugee, citizen or undocumented person.

This paper explores how second-generation Ugandan descendents negotiate ‘return’ to their parenta... more This paper explores how second-generation Ugandan descendents negotiate ‘return’ to their parental ‘homeland’. In this British-based community of citizens, refugees, asylum-seekers and the undocumented, questions of return intertwine with issues of sanctuary, solidarity, identity and documentation. Institutional categories vie with emotional subjectivities across generations. Many in the first generation maintain a transnational optic as they nest their return orientations to ‘home’ within aspirations for their children; whilst for the second generation questions of ‘return’ reveal multiple identity positions to ‘home’ as country-of-birth Britain and ancestral ‘homeland’ Uganda. Temporal considerations loom large and age, life course and generation act as key variables within these debates, with ‘return’ the contested site for negotiating ‘belonging’. What emerges is a differentiated picture as second-generation descendants enact a range of return mobilities and relational engagements to Uganda as ancestral ‘homeland’.

MEDiA: Migration to Europe in the Digital Age State of the Art Report, Working Paper 4, 2010

Book Chapters by Naluwembe Binaisa

This chapter draws on multi-sited research to explore why solidarities forged through the experie... more This chapter draws on multi-sited research to explore why solidarities forged through the experiences of racialisation and racism in Britain struggle to translate into inclusive practices of belonging for Ugandan return migrants in Kampala, across time and space understandings of difference, hierarchies of integration, historical registers of belonging based on ethnicity and ‘race’ shift for migrants. I propose Simmel’s essay, the Stranger, as a useful framework to unpack the limitations of multi-directional social remittances within place-based socio-political and cultural realities. Despite migrants’ iterative coming, going, and settling again someday, social distance endures, embedded in colonial and postcolonial ontologies of alterity that choke pathways to belonging. Harsh inequalities, visible and invisible divisions persist to striate the Kampala cityscape thus undergirding obstacles to equitable belonging.

In recent academic and policy literature the movement of Africans from their countries of origin... more In recent academic and policy literature the movement of Africans from their countries of
origin either as voluntary or involuntary migrants has come to be characterised as the
genesis of 'new'diaspora formations (Koser, 2013; Van Hear, 1998). This chapter seeks to
examine these 'new'African diasporas through the experiences of Ugandans residing in
Britain, which although not the largest group of African descent people living in Britain, are
interesting because of the sustained longevity and broad spectrum of migration ...

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration , 2013

Emigration Nations: Policies and Ideologies of Emigrant Engagement, 2013

Duke University Press eBooks, Sep 15, 2023

Emigration Nations, 2013

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, 2013

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2013

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2013

Anthropology and Photography, 2021

Photography and Culture, 2020

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2013

International Migration Institute Working Paper 41, 2011

MEDiA: Migration to Europe in the Digital Age State of the Art Report, Working Paper 4, 2010

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration , 2013

Emigration Nations: Policies and Ideologies of Emigrant Engagement, 2013

Although current patterns of globalisation may be traced back more than a century, two recent cha... more Although current patterns of globalisation may be traced back more than a century, two recent changes have affected the impact of overseas conflict on UK communities. First, changes in communication technologies now allow direct access to information from a tremendously wide variety of sources, in real time. This ‘globalisation from below’ contrasts with previous stages of globalisation where such tools were concentrated in the hands of state institutions or multinational companies. Second, geopolitical changes, particularly since 1990, have resulted in a growing diversity of migrant groups arriving in the UK, frequently providing direct links to parts of the world undergoing conflict.

Links between overseas conflict and UK communities have received very little attention in the social sciences. The limited literature is focused on the potential for ethno-national diaspora communities in the UK to affect the conditions of conflict elsewhere. This research has expanded and reversed this focus to consider how overseas conflict affects a broad array of communities in the UK.

The understanding of community is central to this research. Notions of ‘community’ were downplayed in public policy in the UK throughout the 1980s and 1990s, but the Cantle report of 2001 marked a return to a language of community in public policy discourse. Yet there is limited conceptual clarity in the ways in which ‘community’ is used. There is particular confusion between the widespread usage of ‘community’ to refer both to local places and to ethno-national groups.

This report has distinguished between these two understandings of community, since public institutions must engage in different ways with each of them. The report uses the term ‘local communities’ to refer to place-based social groups. Rather than the common term ‘black and minority ethnic’ (BME) communities, this report uses the broader term ‘ethno-national communities’. This term also includes minority communities that do not self-identify as ‘black’ or ‘ethnic’, and the ‘majority’ ‘white British’ community. This report has also considered ‘communities of choice’, in this case used to describe civil society mobilisations around particular conflicts, and ‘communities of practice’, which refers to coalitions of professionals focused on an individual issue.

Research for this project has concentrated on the impact of three specific conflicts, selected to provide contrasting examples of UK involvement, geographical area and current intensity. These are: Afghanistan/Pakistan, the Great Lakes (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC], Rwanda, Uganda) and the western Balkans. Following a mapping exercise to determine the extent of the links between these conflicts and the UK, six case studies were identified to cover a broad cross section of the four types of communities considered earlier. Each of the six case studies was the focus of a separate sub-project involving 15–20 interviews and several focus groups.

The research identified six important variables influencing the extent and nature of the impact of these conflicts on UK communities:
• nature of UK involvement;
• proximity of conflict to the UK;
• timing and duration of the conflict;
• size and date of the arrival of diaspora communities in the UK;
• transnational engagement of diaspora; and
• media coverage.

Local communities in London and Birmingham were involved in this research. Two important impacts on local communities were identified as a result of conflict. First, local communities evolve as a result of new entrants. Good practice examples of institutional responses involved the distribution of information to all those local services potentially involved in responding to new arrivals. Second, particular conflicts may alter the relationship between members of local communities and national institutions, such as the Birmingham neighbourhoods where the predominantly Pakistani population felt targeted by security responses to the conflict in Pakistan. This is most likely to be the case where the UK is directly involved in the conflict, either militarily or diplomatically.
Communities of choice identified in this research took the form of civil society organisations formed in response to conflict, often with the aim of challenging the public characterisation of conflict, as in the case of Help for Heroes, or as a way of challenging particular tendencies in UK national policy towards a conflict region.

Communities of practice can describe a wide range of activities, but in this case was used to describe networking of professionals responding to a particular impact of conflict, here the arrival of significant numbers of unaccompanied Afghan asylum-seeking children in two London boroughs, which had implications for health care, education, housing and foster care. The term ‘community of practice’ was coined in the early 1990s, but the idea did not really take off in the public sector in the UK until 2007. There seems to be considerable potential for developing such ad hoc professional coalitions in order to share information and develop policy approaches.

Ethno-national communities were also influenced by the conflicts considered. This research identified situations where interactions between different ethno-national communities from one particular conflict area arose in the UK. One such interaction was between Kosovar Albanians, Bosniacs and Serbians. Given the post-conflict changes in ethnic residential patterns in the former Yugoslavia, spaces for such exchanges have reduced there.

Religious organisations also have an important role to play. This research did not explicitly set out to examine the role of religious organisations. However, it found that, in some cases, they provide a relatively rare opportunity for individuals from a wide variety of other forms of community to come together.

The activities of the communities we considered focused most frequently on questions of perception and information. This includes challenging mainstream media representations of conflict, which tend towards simplified characterisations of conflict based in antipathy between opposing sides. The opening of the Serbian section in Fulham library is a good example of a proactive information campaign resulting from engagement of the local Serbian ethno-national community.
Alternative sources of media provide one possible remedy to the limited information available in mainstream media. In some cases, this involves turning to media sources from foreign countries, which are increasingly widely available through the Internet. An alternative strategy is for community groups to develop particularly focused alternative information sources, by establishing specialist websites. Both of these strategies have the disadvantage that communication with broader public opinion in the UK is limited.

LSE Blog, 2013

The integration of new immigrants is one of the most important issues in Europe, yet not enough i... more The integration of new immigrants is one of the most important issues in Europe, yet not enough is known about the lives of migrants. This book draws on several years of ethnographic research with African migrants in Ireland, many of whom are former asylum seekers. Against the widespread assumptions that integration has been handled well in Ireland and that racism is not a major problem, this book seeks to show that migrants are themselves shaping integration in their everyday lives in the face of enormous challenges. Naluwembe Binaisa recommends this read to students of identity and immigration.

Research Report, 2010

The impact of overseas conflict on community formation, engagements and relationships with UK ins... more The impact of overseas conflict on community formation, engagements and relationships with UK institutions.

Globalisation has intensified and changed the international connections of UK communities. This research studied the impact of conflict on communities in the UK from three areas: Afghanistan/Pakistan, the Great Lakes region (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Uganda) and the western Balkans.

The report:

looks at why some communities are affected more by overseas conflict than others;
examines six detailed case studies of communities affected by overseas conflict;
assesses how different communities challenge assumptions of mainstream society about particular conflicts; and
considers how service providers at national and local level can support affected communities.

This one day workshop, organized as part of the ERC ‘Photodemos’ project concerns itself with que... more This one day workshop, organized as part of the ERC ‘Photodemos’ project
concerns itself with questions of visibility and occlusion. New GDPR protocols demand the anonymity of the face, while research interlocutors might expect the political right to be seen and recognized as a defence against ‘percepticide’. In a further twist, a changing political context might make such visibility highly dangerous. These paradoxes and oppositions are reflected in other ways: the desirability or complications of making colonial histories visible once again, the migration between different media of traumatic histories, the power and fragility of family archives displayed in the public sphere.

Wednesday 3rd July 2019, 1030am-6pm. All welcome!

Anthropology and Photography, 2021

...This photo-essay presents fragments from a collaborative project that has explored the ways in... more ...This photo-essay presents fragments from
a collaborative project that has explored the
ways in which ‘demotic’ photography might
illuminate and frame political futures. The
project, ‘Citizens of photography: the camera
and the political imagination’, is an empirical
anthropological investigation into the relationship
between ‘representation’ through everyday
images and ‘representation’ through politics....

https://therai.org.uk/images/stories/photography/AnthandPhotoVol14.pdf