Ali Nobil Ahmad is the holder of the Sustainable development – IRD / Iméra Chair. His research project at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University project explores the work of Algerian migration sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad in the context of the momentous changes he lived through: colonial occupation; decolonization; postwar migration from Algeria to metropolitan France, and the formation of a postcolonial Maghrebi diaspora in Europe under conditions of racism and socio-economic marginalization. It does so with the objective of shedding a new light on the contemporary significance of Sayad’s legacy, particularly in Anglophone spheres, where his contribution to the study of migration is under-appreciated.
To learn more, view his resident page by clicking here
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0:02 You My name is Alinabil Ahmed. I'm an interdisciplinary social scientist with a background in history and sociology. I'm currently employed at the Heinrich Boll Foundation where I'm a migration specialist in the Africa division. My interests are migration, displacement and environmental justice. My project at Imara is called In Search of Sayad. It's an intellectual biography, an inquiry into the life and work of Abdelmalek Sayad. He was an Algerian sociologist of migration who was born in 1933 in Algeria and died in France in 1998.
0:51 He's quite well known in France where he spent most of his professional life as a researcher at the CNRS. But he's not so well known outside. In the Anglophone world in particular, he remains something of an obscure figure. So the objectives of the project are to shed light on his work in spaces where it's not been widely disseminated and to locate and situate those ideas in his life and times, the context that he lived in. He witnessed some big changes, decolonization, mass migration from Algeria to France, and the formation of a Maghrebi diaspora in France and Europe.
1:30 interesting interesting interesting interesting interesting interesting interesting and also to reflect on Syed's legacy in the context of the challenges we face today. Migration is a highly politicized issue in France, in Europe of course, but also increasingly in North Africa, in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. My long-standing interest in Syed grew out of curiosity in the French sociological tradition of migration research, which in turn grew out of a dissatisfaction with the British and Anglo-American equivalents. Syed seemed to me to innovate in that he focused equally on the sending context of any
2:20 given migration. He encouraged us to look at migration in a holistic sense. Every immigrant is also an emigrant. He was also very attentive to the experiential and psychological dimensions of migration. He looked at the challenges and difficulties that migrants faced and the melancholia, the sadness, the pain and suffering of migration, which was all quite different to the British tradition that dominated my context. Syed was also quite attentive to the body and he was focused also on the way in which male migrants experienced the migration process.
3:03 He was doing what we call gender studies today in some respects. I recently curated a podcast series on African perspectives on migration and mobility. And in the research I did for that, I looked into new work on the relationship between Syed and Bordieu. And I got to wondering why we know so little about Syed in comparison with Bordieu. I wonder if we can tell the story of sociology's evolution as a discipline in a way that's a little bit more complicated than the idea of Bordieu as this canonized figure developing concepts on his own in elevation above the others he worked alongside.
3:47 I'm of course very keen to engage with and learn from the rich community of scholars here at Imerat and in the surrounding areas in Marseille. In particular, I'm excited to be working with Kamel Shashua. He's based at Ihramam, who is a world authority on Abdul-Malek Syed and coordinates a network of scholars who are interested in reflecting on Syed's legacy.
