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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Apostolos Andrikopoulos, "Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
Description: In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine. Through unusually close ethnographic work...