The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally reshaped global mobility regimes and border security practices, with particularly acute impacts on irregular migrants from Africa seeking passage to the Global North. This panel examines how the intersection of heightened border securitization, health surveillance, and deeply rooted anti-black racism has transformed the experiences of young African migrants in transit spaces since 2020.
Drawing on original ethnographic research, digital storytelling projects, and participatory action research with migrants in key transit hubs across North Africa and the Mediterranean, our panelists analyze how pandemic-era border policies have intensified existing patterns of racial discrimination while creating new forms of precarity for African youth on the move. The papers explore how young migrants navigate enhanced digital surveillance, health screening protocols, and racial profiling in transit camps, detention centers, and border zones, developing new strategies of mobility and resistance in response.
Key themes include:
the weaponization of public health measures against Black African bodies;
the role of race in determining access to asylum and humanitarian protection;
the emergence of new forms of solidarity and mutual aid among trapped migrants;
human trafficking, migrant smuggling, and criminalization in border and security policy implementation;
and the ways COVID-19 has both disrupted and reinforced established patterns of migration control and racial exclusion.
By examining these intersecting dynamics, the panel contributes to urgent scholarly conversations about race, mobility justice, and border politics in our contemporary moment.
This interdisciplinary panel brings together perspectives from migration studies, critical race theory, public health, public policy, and strategic and border studies to illuminate how anti-blackness shapes the governance of human mobility in times of crisis. By centering the lived experiences and agency of young African migrants, the papers challenge dominant security-focused narratives while highlighting emerging forms of resistance and community-building in an increasingly hostile global migration regime.
Submission Details:
Interdisciplinary scholars, researchers, writers, practitioners, and graduate students engaged in themes of African migration, race and transnational identities, and diasporic lived experiences should endeavor to participate in this vibrant discourse. Contributions from history, public policy, border and security studies, anthropology, sociology, media studies, literature, and digital humanities are welcome.
If you wish to participate in this panel, please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biography to [asb232@pitt.edu] by March 15th, 2025.
