Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
Anthropology
Advisor
Vincent Crapanzano
Committee Members
John Collins
Patricia Tovar
Marina Sitrin
Subject Categories
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Keywords
Intersectionality, Migration, Lusophone Africa, Portugal, European Union, Mobility Projects
Abstract
This dissertation uses life story interviews and participant observation to engage the struggles, aspirations, survival strategies, and lived experiences of solidarity of 15 people who migrated from Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe, and Angola, to Lisbon, Portugal between 2015 and 2021. The dissertation was produced at a time when human movement from Africa and the Middle East to Europe was stigmatized and heavily mediatized as the European Migration “Crisis.” In this discourse, Portugal emerged as a model of solidary integration policy and discourse in the European migration space. Drawing from immigrants’ narratives, I argue that the aspirations, struggles, and survival strategies that inform lived experiences of integration processes, as well as their life-altering consequences, are determined by the intersecting social locations that people inhabit within power relations shaped by transnational hierarchies of gender, race, class, national origin, and sexuality. I show that an intersectional approach to migrant integration remains increasingly relevant today. It allows us to defy the epistemic violence of neo-colonial approaches that dominate knowledge production on immigrant integration by homogenizing integration experiences.
Recommended Citation
Gomes Duarte, Lais, "Struggles, Aspirations, and Survival Strategies: The Intersectionality of Lived Experiences of Migrant “Integration” into Lisbon" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5867