
Ignacio Fradejas-GarcíaUniversity of Iceland | HI · School of Social Sciences
Ignacio Fradejas-García
PhD
Post-doctoral research: (im)mobility & racism in Europe & beyond. Open to collaborations.
About
33
Publications
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Introduction
Ignacio Fradejas-García currently works as a post-doc in the School of Social Sciences at Iceland University, within the interdisciplinary research project "Creating Europe through Racialized Mobilities" https://cerm.hi.is/. With extensive fieldwork experience in The Gambia, Chile, Morocco, Haiti, RD Congo, Turkey, Romania and Spain, he does research in migration, transnationalism, (im)mobilities, humanitarianism and informality.
Publications
Publications (33)
Post-Weberian definitions see the state–individual relationship as a “do ut des” one. The state grants protection, education, medical care, and its citizens contribute labour, compliance, and taxes. When this does not occur, it is generally accepted that the citizens are deviating from state goals. However, there are cases where lack of compliance...
Thanks to the latest developments in network-oriented sampling, it is now possible to measure “transnational social fields,” or emergent social structures that connect places or regions in different countries. These structures are instrumental in explaining sociocultural phenomena like the emergence of ethnic or demographic enclaves, social and eco...
This chapter explores the relationship between (im)mobility and informality by analyzing how informal practices evolve when people migrate and move within transnational social fields. The livelihood perspective allows us to analyze informality and (im)mobility as strategies that individuals and households perform to make a living, including the rol...
In this article we focus on individuals’ structural embeddedness in transnational social fields (TSFs) and examine how this is related to patterns of international mobility. The main argument is that the structure of TSFs matters for (im)mobility trajectories, and thus all actors (migrants, non‐migrants, and returnees) need to be examined as a whol...
La etnografía de Smita Yadav nos cuenta la historia de los Gond, una tribu indígena de la India que ha sido desplazada tras la creación de una reserva para tigres y cuyas familias se están ganando la vida en la economía informal, obviando la ayuda o la presencia del estado. La autora examina en detalle la historia oral y las instituciones sociales...
Publicado el libro “Transformaciones y retos de la movilidad de los Europeos del Este en España: Treinta años después de la caída del muro de Berlín: 1989-2019” Editorial Tirant lo Blanch.
https://editorial.tirant.com/es/libro/transformaciones-y-retos-de-la-movilidad-de-los-europeos-del-este-en-espana-treinta-anos-despues-de-la-caida-del-muro-de-be...
This article unpacks informal practices related to modernity’s quintessential mobility machine: the car. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among low-wage Romanian immigrants in Spain who maintain transnational connections with their regions of origin in Romania, this paper addresses the role of the automobile system and of informal practices in migra...
People around the globe rely on informal practices to resist, survive, care and relate to each other beyond the control and coercive presence of institutions and states. In the EU, regimes of mobility at multiple scales affect various people on the move who are pushed into informality in order to acquire social mobility while having to combat borde...
Este texto presenta un número especial dedicado a etnografiar los primeros meses de la pandemia provocada por el virus SARS-CoV-2 y las consecuentes medidas de aislamiento y distancia social. Basados en materiales empíricos recogidos entre marzo y mayo del año 2020, los textos etnográficos muestran con viveza la enorme singularidad de este período....
This text introduces a special issue dedicated to compiling ethnographic accounts of the first months of the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the consequent isolation and social distancing measures. Based on empirical materials collected between March and May of 2020, the ethnographic texts vividly show the uniqueness of this period. It...
Este texto y la sección especial que introduce tienen un triple objetivo. Por una parte, se intenta describir qué se ha hecho desde la antropología social y cultural en Asturias, tanto a nivel de investigación como de organización formal. Por otro lado, trata de responder a qué se está investigando hoy en día en la región. Por último, se ambiciona...
Este artículo analiza la inclusión del enfoque de género en la operación humanitaria en respuesta al conflicto en el norte de Siria y coordinada desde Turquía bajo el paraguas de Naciones Unidas. La investigación se enmarca en los estudios sobre género y acción humanitaria, además de enlazar con la vindicación de los derechos humanos de las mujeres...
This paper explores how the United Nations (UN) system promotes mobilities for some employees while limiting the physical and social mobility of others. To this purpose, we take an ethnographic and comparative approach between four UN duty stations: the UN main offices in Geneva (Switzerland) and Vienna (Austria); and the UN field offices in Goma (...
Short essay with reflections on Ruben Andersson's book 'No Go World' in a bookforum organized by Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art & World.
El texto introductorio de esta sección especial se divide en dos partes. Por un lado, se exponen las motivaciones para proponer una revisita a los clásicos y se introducen los dos textos de la sección especial, llamada "Revisitando a los clásicos", conectando con la presentación de una nueva sección llamada "Reimpresión", la cual publicará textos c...
en In response to the Syrian conflict, the biggest humanitarian challenge since the Second World War, aid organisations have set up large‐scale cross‐border operations. Aid convoys and workers within Syria have become targets, forcing most operations to be carried out remotely from the Turkish border city of Gaziantep, a ‘little Aleppo’ hosting mor...
Review in Spanish of “The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality:
Understanding Social and Cultural Complexity" by Alena Ledeneva (Ed.)
Entre las salidas profesionales ofertadas para las personas graduadas en ciencias sociales
siempre aparecerá un epígrafe que dice, a grandes rasgos: tercer sector, ONGs y organismos
internacionales. Sin embargo, se sabe muy poco de la labor que realizan estos trabajadores,
más allá de los retratos estereotipados y los imaginarios asistenciales q...
Power to the Pedals tells the story of Wenzday Jane, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, resident and her company Metro Pedal Power, a local cargo service that uses only pedal-powered vehicles. The business Wenzday founded is part of a wider movement exploring new horizons in urban life, seeking to integrate the values of sustainability and environmental p...
Blog post about humanitarian remoteness following a thematic thread on #remoteness at https://allegralaboratory.net takes some steps towards addressing the return of remoteness from a variety of angles.
The post argument is further developep in the article:
Fradejas-García, I. (2019) Humanitarian remoteness: aid work practices from ‘little Aleppo...
La literatura crítica con el humanitarismo ha emergido en el ámbito político internacional para quedarse. Cambiando el clásico enfoque en los beneficiarios, las políticas y los programas para pasar a indagar sobre las organizaciones y los tra-bajadores humanitarios, Liisa Malkki ha hecho una gran contribución a esta literatura profundizando en el p...
Review in Spanish of the Liisa H. Malkki's book: "The Need to Help. The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarism". Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2015. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5932-6
La literatura crítica con el humanitarismo ha emergido en el ámbito político internacional para quedarse. Renombrados científicos sociales como Didier Fassin (2012) o Thomas G. Weiss (2016), entre otros, han trabajado sobre los efectos de las intervenciones humanitarias desde diferentes ángulos. Cambiando el clásico enfoque en los beneficiarios, la...
Desde el cambio de milenio los trabajadores del sector de la ayuda humanitaria y de la cooperación internacional han despertado una respetable atención académica, generando un nuevo corpus que analiza sus problemáticas y prácticas específicas. Peaceland es la metáfora que utiliza la autora de este libro, Séverine Autesserre, para agrupar a la comun...
Desde el cambio de milenio los trabajadores del sector de la ayuda humanitaria y de la cooperación internacional han despertado una respetable atención académica, generando un nuevo corpus que analiza sus problemáticas y prácticas específicas. Peaceland es la metáfora que utiliza la autora de este libro, Séverine Autesserre, para agrupar a la comun...
In this paper, through an ethnographic case, we describe and discuss the role that currently plays the descendent principles in the access to land ownership among the Aymara farmers in the highland region of Arica-Parinacota region at the northern Chile. In particular, we investigate the continued validity of the highland model of patrilineage and...
Questions
Question (1)
I'm interested in social science journals run by PhD fellows, but any good reference about academic journal management is welcome. Thanks.
Projects
Project (1)
Romanian enclaves in Spain have received little academic attention so far, but are nevertheless of singular importance locally. In this study, we investigate two Romanian enclaves located in Castellón de la Plana and in Roquetas de Mar. In the first case, the enclave has emerged as a response to the demand of workers in the ceramic industry and construcion, and in the second case, in agriculture. We wish to contribute to the knowledge base about demographic enclaves by addressing two gaps in the literature.
First, the functioning of ethnic enclaves has hardly been studied in tandem with the migration dynamics of the involved actors. Nevertheless, our prior research has shown that the phenomenon of the emergence of ethnic enclaves should be conceptualized taking into account the transnational social fields that fuel it and not only the internal dynamics in the enclave and the country of residence. We therefore study enclaves from a transnational perspective, which allows us to see how individuals in the two places coordinate their mobility patterns and care arrangements in order to benefit from the ethnic enclave.
Second, prior research that measured transnational social fields quantitatively tended to focus exclusively on individuals as actors, ignoring organizational entities that may nevertheless greatly affect both migration patterns of individuals and the functioning of the enclave in labour market terms. To fill this gap, we combine an individual and an institutional perspective in a two-level social network model. We believe that this multilevel design is able to give a more complete understanding of ethnic enclaves.
Our ultimate objective, then, is to investigate how circular migration patterns are intertwined with the emergence, maintenance and possible decay of enclaves, and how different individual positions in the transnational field are related to differences in outcomes such as labour market positions and the construction of the sense of community and identification.
Specifically, our research questions are the following:
1. How can we conceptualize and measure the dimensions of transnational social fields?
2. How can we identify the possible existence of specialized roles in these structures and what are their functions?
3. What is the role that organizational entities play in transnational social structures?
4. What is the relation between these transnational structures and the emergence, maintenance and possible decay of enclaves?
5. What effects do individual positions in these structures have on the insertion at the labour market, sense of belonging with Spain, Rumania and Europe, and in general, with the social integration of Romanian immigrants?
We propose intensive, multisited fieldwork in the two enclaves in Spain and the community of origin in Romania (in the region of Dâmbovița), combining ethnography and multilevel social network analysis. We will use recently developed, innovative methods of data collection and data analysis to reach our goals.