Film Screening and Discussion: En Route to Europe, We Burn or Die

Join the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies for a screening of En Route to Europe, We Burn or Die followed by a discussion. This documentary is by CCAS professor Noureddine Jebnoun and alumni of the Master of Arts in Arab Studies program Jakob Plaschke. Please see the film synopsis and biographies of the discussants below.

In the port city town of Zarzis in Tunisia, the sea has always been a space of mobility. However, with Fortress Europe entrenching its sea walls and extending proxy borders into North and West Africa by sponsoring local coercive apparatuses, illegalized and irregularized travelers engaging in migration as a means to overcome political, economic and social marginalization while looking for better opportunities face more and more violence and risk. The documentary film based on extensive fieldwork tells the stories of individuals who are navigating precarity while impacted in various ways by the production as well as the securitization-policing of deadliest border control across Africa and the Mediterranean Sea. Through interviews in and around Zarzis, the film explores the experiences, journeys, opinions and motivations of African migrants – Tunisians and other nationals – as well as the neoliberal structures that make their travels so dangerous

Ahlam Chemlali is a PhD candidate at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Chemlali’s research focuses on migration and border politics, violence, transit, undocumented migration, migrants’ everyday lives, death, and European migration politics. Chemlali’s geographic focus is on North Africa, specifically Tunisia and Libya, the Mediterranean, and Europe’s Southern borders. Her current work examines the politics and practices of border violence in contemporary European migration politics. Chemlali explores how the externalization of European border control into North Africa produces the everyday violence of the border and how this shapes gendered experiences.

Amade M’charek is Professor Anthropology of Science at the department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests are in forensics, forensic anthropology and race. She is the PI of the project Dutchness in Genes and Genealogy, a project examining how Dutchness is enacted in collaborations between population geneticists, archaeologists and genealogists. M’charek is also the PI of the project Sexuality & Diversity in the Making. She is the founding chair of the European Network for the Social Studies of Forensics (EUnetSSF) and the convenor of the seminar series Ir/relevance of Race in Science and Society. Her most recent research is on face making and race making in forensic identification, for which she received a five-year ERC consolidator grant in December 2013.

Lahra Smith is Director of the African Studies Program at Georgetown University. She is a political scientist with a particular interest in African politics, migration and refugees, and citizenship and equality. Her book, Making Citizens in Africa: Ethnicity, Gender and National Identity in Ethiopia, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. She teaches courses on migration, women and politics and theory and policy in Africa. She was the Center for Social Justice Faculty Fellow for African Migration and is currently a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of International Migration.

Noureddine Jebnoun teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service. Previously, he taught in Tunisia at the National War College, the Command and Staff College, and the National Defense Institute (1998–2004). His main research interests include Arab politics, contentious politics (i.e., people activism/mobilization, and collective protest) in the Arab World, comparative Arab civil-military relations, U.S. and West Asia and North Africa, critical political economy of the Arab World, socio-political dynamics in the Arabian Peninsula, and cross-border movements including migrants, refugees as well as internal displacement in the Sahara-Sahel region.