Takhayyul Seminar: ““The migrant dream of stability”

Samuli Schielke is a social and cultural anthropologist working on contemporary Egypt and its diasporas. He is a senior research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), and associate primary investigator at Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. He is author of The Perils of Joy (2012), Egypt in the Future Tense (2015), and Migrant Dreams (2020).

His work is one of the most crucial attempts to build a bridge between multiple imaginaries of the migrants and the locals.

A key paradox of the age of globalisation is that the search for a normal, settled, conventional life relies on unsettling processes of growth and mobility. Migrations worldwide are driven by socially conservative dreams of a return home to live in stability, and yet they often result in unsettling transformations. Samuli Schielke reflects on these dynamics in his recent book Migrant Dreams about Egyptian workers in the Arab Gulf states. In his presentation, he adds insights about the impact of the Covid pandemic on workers in the Gulf, and about the easily overlooked contributions of human labour and fossil energy that enable the illusion of stable capitalism and also many of its critiques.