Within the 2025 European Conference of African Studies (Prague, 25-28 June 2025), Paolo Boccagni and Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye (Institut des mondes africains – IMAF) have convened a session on “African ways of dwelling in Europe: a conversation across housing pathways and home cultures“. The proposed panel is in Anthropology, under the thematic stream “Afropolitanism and Afropean Belongings”. Deadline for online abstract submissions: 15 December. More details below!

SHORT DESCRIPTION

Dwelling is a privileged field for the interplay between African, Afropolitan and Afropean ways of being and belonging. Our session invites a fieldwork-based conversation on housing and home (un)making, and the underlying constellations of domesticity and inequality, in the Euro-African diaspora.

ABSTRACT

How is it that men and women with an African background make themselves at home across Europe? What do their housing trajectories and conditions tell about their social position, cultural backgrounds, and (over)exposure to inequality and discrimination?

Drawing also on our recent ethnographies of shared housing among African men in France (Mbodj-Pouye, 2023) and in Italy (Boccagni, forthcoming), we interrogate (in)formal ways of dwelling as a source of systemic insight on the mainstream society and on diasporic ties with African cities, communities, and families. The session aims to cut across the political economy of housing and home ownership, local and transnational, with the associated patterns of urbanization and marginalization, and the biographical approaches to housing pathways and ways of dwelling, as articulations of preexisting domestic cultures and ways of conviviality that change and are re-adapted over time. We welcome fieldwork-based papers that attend to inner diversities and inequalities among individuals and families from Africa, or with an African background, in gender, age, generation, legal status and class, as much as ethnic and religious background.

Overall, the session is meant to open African studies to fruitful conversation with fields like housing/urban studies, everyday multiculturalism, material culture, and the study of home as a space to reconstruct personal and collective stories of migration, (un)belonging, and diasporic heritage and legacy. What accounts – we eventually ask – for “African”, “Afropolitan” or “Afropean” modes of being to emerge from the lived and shared experience of home across Europe?