ABSTRACT This article challenges entrenched notions of otherness, which presuppose that migrants’ experiences always are inherently different from those of other people. By exploring the experiences ...of white, middle‐class, highly educated Swedes living in Sweden, I highlight some similarities with challenges traditionally attributed solely to migrants. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Swedish hub of a large international company, the article examines experiences of Swedish employees participating in international digital meetings, a significant aspect of their daily professional lives. It elucidates aspects of their experiences that are often associated with migrants: struggling with language, feeling dominated and unseen and striving to adapt while subtly challenging the dominance of British and American ‘natives’ through practices of boundary maintenance. The article contributes to the de‐exceptionalization of migrants’ experiences without further equating the privileged Swedes’ living conditions with those of people who are migranticized and subjected to enduring othering in their everyday lives.
This article is about people living in the Global South who in their daily interactions cross what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls 'the abyssal line'. It portrays encounters between Portuguese ...migrants and Mozambican locals in the capital city of Maputo. The article specifically focuses on their interactions at workplaces and highlights the narratives through which they talk about and practise the transfer of knowledge taking place between them. An absolute fundament in these processes is the coloniality of knowledge or the epistemic dimension of (post)colonial domination. As the author demonstrates, both parties have naturalised the coloniality of knowledge, which implies that Portuguese migrants tend to see it as their inherent and natural right and duty to lecture and train the Mozambicans they work with. The Portuguese's epistemological approach is intimately tied to their understanding of Mozambicans as human beings - or, in other words, the coloniality of knowledge goes hand in hand with the coloniality of being, or the existential dimension of (post)colonial domination. The author's analysis revolves around the attitudes of the Portuguese, as described by themselves, but the article ends with a representation of Mozambican discursive attempts to unsettle Portuguese dominant positions and thereby resist the coloniality of being.
Africa’s Return Migrants Åkesson, Lisa; Baaz, Maria Eriksson
2015, 2015., 2015-07-09, 2015-07-15, Volume:
8
eBook, Book
Open access
Many African migrants residing abroad nurture a hope to one day return, at least temporarily, to their home country. In the wake of economic crises in the developed world, alongside rapid economic ...growth in parts of Africa, the impetus to 'return' is likely to increase. Such returnees are often portrayed as agents of development, bringing with them capital, knowledge and skills as well as connections and experience gained abroad. Yet, the reality is altogether more complex. In this much-needed volume, based on extensive original fieldwork, the authors reveal that there is all too often a gaping divide between abstract policy assumptions and migrants' actual practices. In contrast to the prevailing optimism of policies on migration and development, Africa's Return Migrants demonstrates that the capital obtained abroad is not always advantageous and that it can even hamper successful entrepreneurship and other forms of economic, political and social engagement.
In the Atlantic Ocean island state of Cabo Verde, silence about hunger is perennial. Elderly people who lived through devastating famines during Portuguese colonialism seldom talk about their ...memories, and contemporary experiences of food deprivation are buried in silence. Yet there is one space in which the silence is broken: music. Exploring that space, this article analyses representations of drought and hunger in Cabo Verdean music and explores the social contexts, positionalities and sentiments that the lyrics evoke. The article portrays the everyday listening to and singing of the lyrics as a kind of 'organic remembering' and demonstrates how it contributes to a view of hunger as a key symbol of the nation at the same time as the experience of hunger is surrounded by silence in everyday life. Furthermore, the article brings up the silencing of the Portuguese' colonial responsibility for the sufferings. It also presents some reasons for this, including Cabo Verde's hybrid position in the Portuguese empire as an uneasy mixture between a distant and neglected appendage to the metropole and a colony. Finally, it argues that not blaming the ex-colonisers has been an important way forward for the small and dependent postcolonial state.
For the first time in sub-Saharan Africa's postcolonial history, large numbers of citizens of a European former colonial power are migrating to an ex-colony. Portuguese migrants are attracted by ...Angola's strong economic growth and are seeking to escape crisis in Portugal. This article focuses on everyday workplace relations between Angolans and Portuguese. In particular, it analyses how colonial power relations still resonate with both groups and whether their mutual imaginaries are moving beyond the colonial past. The article concludes that dependence on access to the labour market and the goodwill of Angola's political and administrative class has undercut the ex-colonisers' dominance. Yet colonial imaginaries are still in play, particularly among the Portuguese. Consequently, postcolonial power relations among Angolans and Portuguese are contested and unstable. Pour la première fois dans l'histoire postcoloniale de l'Afrique subsaharienne, un grand nombre de citoyens d'une ancienne puissance coloniale européenne émigrent vers une ex colonie. Les migrants portugais sont attirés par la forte croissance économique de l'Angola et tentent par là même d'échapper à la crise au Portugal. Cet article porte sur les relations quotidiennes entre Angolais et Portugais dans leur cadre de travail. Il analyse en particulier à quel point les relations de pouvoir instituées durant l'époque coloniale ont toujours un echo chez les deux groupes et dans quelles limites leur imaginaire mutuel a pu dépasser cette histoire. L'article conclut que la situation de dépendance des Portugais vis-à-vis de l'accès au marché du travail associée à la bonne volonté de la classe politique et administrative angolaise a atténué le positionnement dominant des anciens colonisateurs. Cependant, les imaginaires coloniaux sont toujours présents, surtout chez les Portugais. Par conséquent, les rapports de force post-coloniaux entre Angolais et Portugais restent instables et font l'objet de fréquentes contestations.
Global discourses and measures to combat corruption have often built on and reinforced the image of a dichotomy between the supposedly non-corrupt European Self and the underdeveloped, corrupt Other. ...This article unsettles this binary by looking at practices and discourses of corruption among Portuguese migrants to Angola. Recently, the economic crisis in southern Europe pushed thousands of Portuguese citizens to migrate to Portugal's former colony in search of economic security and opportunities. Building on 55 in-depth interviews with Portuguese migrants and their Angolan work colleagues, the article shows how in Angola, the Portuguese encountered a society marred by both high-level and petty corruption. However, the migrants were affected by and engaged in corruption in very different ways, depending on their socio-economic situation. Non-elite migrants, and particularly the undocumented, were susceptible to corruption as they struggled to complete their paperwork, make a living and support families back home. Migrants involved in big business were often closely allied with the Angolan elite and engaged in bribery and other forms of corruption in their profit-making ventures. The article also discusses identity construction in this postcolonial context. It finds that a persistent image of the former colonial masters as 'civilizers' and 'more developed' coexists with the new Portuguese position of subordination and vulnerability in relation to the unpredictable and corrupt Angolan party-state. Anti-corruption is, however, not part of a new Portuguese civilizing mission - rather the similarities and continuity between Portugal and Angola is emphasized, and corruption is described as a shared problem.
Balancing disease control and toxicity from chemotherapy and radiotherapy (RT) when treating early-stage classical Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL) is important. Available data on long-term toxicity after RT ...for cHL mostly refer to RT techniques no longer in use. We aimed to describe long-term toxicity from modern limited-field (LF)-RT after two or four cycles of doxorubicin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine (ABVD).
This study included all patients with cHL treated with two or four cycles of ABVD and 30 Gy LF-RT during 1999-2005 in Sweden. Patients (n = 215) and comparators (n = 860), matched for age, gender, and region of residence, were cross-checked against national health registries for malignancies, diseases of the circulatory system (DCS), and diseases of the respiratory system (DRS) from the day of diagnosis of cHL.
The risk of a malignancy was higher for patients than comparators, hazard ratio (HR) 1.5 (95% CI, 1.0 to 2.4), as was the risk for DCS 1.5 (95% CI, 1.1 to 2.0) and for DRS 2.6 (95% CI, 1.6 to 4.3). The median follow-up was 16 years (range, 12-19 years). Of individual diagnoses in DCS, only venous thromboembolism was statistically significantly elevated. If the first 6 months (ie, time of active treatment for cHL) were excluded and censoring at relapse of cHL or diagnosis of any malignancy, the increased HR for venous thromboembolism diminished. Most of the excess risk for DRS consisted of asthma, HR 3.5 (95% CI, 1.8 to 6.8). Patients diagnosed with DRS were significantly younger than comparators.
Compared with toxicity from earlier RT techniques, excess morbidity was not eliminated, but lower than previously reported. The elevated risk of DRS was driven by diagnosis of asthma, which could in part be explained by misdiagnosis of persisting pulmonary toxicity.
This article examines migrant remittances through the lens of anthropological theories of gift relationships. I explore remittance transactions as perceived and practised by people in Cape Verde, a ...country in which many households receive money from abroad. The article highlights three key dimensions. The first dimension is the transactors' (senders and receivers of remittances) relations and obligations to each other, the second is the degree to which remittances are seen as voluntary gifts or, alternatively, as elements in an obligatory reciprocal exchange, and the third is the relation between the transactors and money as an object of exchange. I argue that these dimensions together open up for a holistic understanding of the dynamic interplay between remittances and relationships. In contrast to mainstream remittance studies, with their conventional focus on economic rationality, this is an approach that illuminates what remittances mean, as social practice, to those involved.
Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a common problem among patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and with some other cancers. Here, we evaluated genetic and non-genetic potential risk factors for ...VTE among GBM patients.
A cohort of 139 patients treated with concomitant radiotherapy and temozolomide were included in the study. Next generation sequencing and genotyping approaches were applied to assess genetic risk factors in the haemostatic system. Clinical data including surgery, reoperation as well as blood group and patient information such as age and gender were available from patient records. Logistic regression analysis was performed to asses VTE risk.
In the study 47 patients (34%) were diagnosed for VTE during the course of their disease. When genetic and non-genetic potential risk factors were evaluated, only B blood group was found to be significantly associated with VTE incidence (odds ratio OR = 6.91; confidence interval CI = 2.19–24.14; P = 0.001). In contrast, A and O blood groups did not correlate with VTE risk. Frontal lobe tumor location also seemed to slightly increase VTE risk compared to other brain sites (OR = 3.14; CI = 1.1–10.7) although the significance level was at borderline (P = 0.05). Current study identified B blood group as the component in non-O blood groups that is responsible for increased VTE risk.
In conclusion, these results suggest for the first time that B blood group is predictive for VTE incidence among patients with glioblastoma, information that may be potentially valuable when selecting GBM patients who are at risk for VTE for anticoagulant prophylaxis.
•Thrombosis is a major problem in patients with high grade glioblastoma tumors (GBM).•We investigated several potential thrombosis risk factors in 139 GBM patients.•B blood group but not A or O blood groups significantly increased thrombosis risk.•GBM patients with B blood group could benefit from thrombosis prophylaxis.
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