Project description
Football, migration and religion among West Africans
Many West African youths aspire to pursue football careers in Europe but often become victims of deceitful agents. Researchers have overlooked the role of religion, particularly Pentecostal Christianity and Islam, in this context. The MSCA-funded JANUSHOPE project studies the concept of hope among African migrants in Europe by exploring the intersection of football, migration and religion. It will focus on African football migrants in Europe who are considered irregular. Its objective is to critically analyse the darker aspects of hope within the global football industry while striving for success. The project also examines how narratives of faith-based hope can critique and perpetuate global capitalism and transnational migration inequalities. The research involves conducting semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.
Objective
Since the 1990s and the commercialization of global football, an increasing number of young people in countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career, a strategy to migrate abroad (ideally Europe), and an opportunity for social and class mobility. For the majority, however, the dream does not come true. International media and human rights organizations regularly report about thousands of young West Africans victimized by deceitful agents, stranded as undocumented migrants, and playing for clubs under exploitative conditions. And yet, young people continue to train to migrate and play. Scholars have studied these football-related migrations, but they have overlooked the fact that religions, especially Pentecostal Christianity and Islam, play a central role in migrants’ hopeful journeys. This project investigates the intersection of football, migration, and religion among African migrants in Europe in order to study hope, conceptualized as a belief that something desired may occur in the future. It makes a crucial critical intervention: while many interdisciplinary studies assume a depoliticized notion of hope and romanticize its positive and constructive qualities, JANUSHOPE also examines the dark side of hope that perpetuates inequality and exploitation. It turns to African “irregular” football migrants in Europe to understand how a critique of the global industry’s dark side of hope might co-exist with hopes for “making it” in the industry. It investigates how their faith-based narratives of hope might both critique and reproduce inequalities of global capitalism and transnational migration. The key research methods are semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with “irregular” African football migrants in Europe. The results will be disseminated through refereed articles and communicated to a wide global audience interested in football and to key European policy makers in fields of migration and human rights.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionreligionsislam
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionreligionschristianity
- social sciencessociologydemographyhuman migrations
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
9712CP Groningen
Netherlands