The MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship project "JANUSHOPE: Football, Migration, and Religion Between West Africa and Europe" was situated at the intersection of social anthropology and human geography and addressed pressing questions concerning migration, inequality, and future-making. Football has become a major driver of migration aspirations among young Africans, while religion increasingly shapes how migrants interpret risk, hardship, and the possibility of success. At the same time, European policy debates on migration, labor exploitation, and human trafficking often struggle to account for migrants’ affective orientations and subjective motivations.
JANUSHOPE investigated the intersection of football, migration, and religion among West African migrants in Europe through the analytical lens of hope, defined as a belief that something desired may occur in the future. While interdisciplinary research often treats hope as abstract, depoliticized, or inherently positive, the project examined its “two-faced” nature by analyzing how hope can both sustain agency and reproduce inequality and exploitation. By focusing on African football migrants with irregular migration trajectories, the project explored how faith-based narratives of hope may simultaneously critique and reinforce unequal global structures.
The overall objective was to understand how hopes for social mobility through football are formed, maintained, contested, and embodied, and how religion mediates these processes. By foregrounding lived experiences often absent from official statistics and policy frameworks, the project aimed to generate knowledge relevant to academic debates, public discourse, and EU policy priorities related to migration governance, labor exploitation, and trafficking.
