Invitation to a guest lecture: “Towards a Migrant Epistemology: Ghurba, Sideways Belonging, and the “Postcolonial It” among migrant communities in Paris

The full-length title of the lecture is “Towards a Migrant Epistemology: Ghurba, Sideways Belonging, and the “Postcolonial It” among migrant communities in Paris“

We warmly welcome you to join us for an interesting exchange around this timely topic on Tuesday 18th of November 2025 at 1PM (EET), in room HUTK-HUM 330-331 of the Faculty of Humanities!

Don’t hesitate to contact Bruno Lefort (bruno.lefort@oulu.fi) or Saara Toukolehto (saara.toukolehto@oulu.fi) if you have any questions related to the lecture.

We hope to see many of you then!

Lecture abstract

This talk interrogates the tacit and often ineffable dimensions of the migrant condition, drawing on ethnographic research with Egyptian communities in Paris. It challenges state-centric and institutional frameworks that dominate migration studies, arguing instead for an epistemology grounded in migrants’ own lived experiences and cultural repertoires.

The analysis unfolds across three interconnected registers of the ineffable. First, it examines the Arabic cultural idiom of ghurba, a profound sense of estrangement and existential displacement. Far from a mere descriptor of alienation, ghurba is revealed as a generative social space that fosters a distinct ethics of solidarity and care, where shared recognition of alienation momentarily suspends its isolating effects.

Second, the talk explores how belonging is constructed not vertically, in relation to the state, but laterally; through sideways belonging. Egyptian migrants navigate the postcolonial metropolis by embedding themselves within the established infrastructures and social worlds of other migrant communities. This relational mode of existence provides crucial navigational capital while simultaneously sidelining state-coded modes of belonging.

Moving beyond abstraction, this talk posits the postcolonial condition of migration as a tangible structure of feeling, ineffable at times, but collectively inhabited and intuitively known. At its core is a postcolonial “it”: A shared phenomenological reality forged in the crucible of intimate solidarities and relational navigations, which enables a resilient re-coding of the very logics designed to marginalize.

About the speaker

Soukaina Chakkour is a lecturer at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. She works on issues of migration, postcolonial politics and migrant temporalities. Soukaina was previously a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and she recently completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands in Cultural Anthropology with a dissertation entitled: “Living the postcolony: Egyptian (Be)longings in Paris”. She is currently based in Morocco where she engages with developing critical Global South pedagogies.