This project aims to undertake ethnographies of heterogeneous memory-making practices and sites along migration routes from Africa to Europe, and to explore the significance of migrant cultural heritage for political theory and action towards justice. The research focuses on migration and human mobility as analytical lenses for conceptualizing cultural heritage beyond sedentarist and nationalist frameworks, exploring the nexus between mobility and cultural heritage in a threefold direction. (i) It investigates the political and social heritage generated by migrants’ presence and by contemporary mobile experiences of struggle and solidarity, exploring how these are remembered or forgotten through intangible, private, local and digital forms of cultural heritage produced by migrants, as well as in forms of public heritage on migration routes. (ii) It draws on these processes to reconceptualize cultural heritage and theorize its relationship to migration (iii) It considers whether and how the cultural heritage of mobility, violence and solidarity traced along migrant routes might serve as political resources for justice-claims.

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