RENATO DE ALMEIDA ARÃO GALHARDI

PhD Candidate in Social and Political Science at Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA);
Candidato al Doctorado en Ciencias Sociales y Políticas por la Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA)

As a life-long immigrant, the experience of migration has become a structuring element of my social reality. Born in Brazil, I travelled on the behest of my mother, to the United Kingdom, at the age of four where I spent a consecutive 6 years. From there, I followed my mother to Geneva, Switzerland - not before spending a brief year in Paris, France – where I spent my teenage years and left, at the age of 17, to study Sociology in the United States. Studying Sociology in San Francisco at the turn of the century provided an ideal scenario to engage with how social contexts, styles, ontologies, and Selves interact in a diverse and dynamic space.

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Throughout my undergraduate years, my interest veered towards ethnic interplay and interaction, identity, and migration of the “dispossessed”. My undergraduate thesis discussed the usage of graffiti as identity markers and resources and proved to be my first ethnographic experience engaging with on the ground qualitative methodologies as I interviewed and engaged in participant observation of graffiti artists, in their contexts and situations, focusing on Mexican immigrants in the San Francisco metropolitan area. After graduating in sociology in 2004, I moved back to my hometown of Brasília, Brazil to face the distressing notion of not belonging “neither here nor there”. My family jokingly called me “tourist” or “gringo” and my year-long engagement with the University of Brasilia demonstrated how far detached I had become of cultural “Brazilian” markers. For this reason, I did not seem to find common ground with my fellow students in the department of Social Sciences at the University of Brasília, while finding common ground in the other-ness presented and experienced by exchange students and foreigners attending the University. This embodied and situational development of my “condition” of being an “immigrant” -a privileged one, of course – drew me closer to the field of inquiry of the condition of human migration and how the experience of migration shapes underlying notions of Selves and placement as well as world-views.

After entering the Master’s in Social Science program at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Mexico City, I sought to engage with how second generation Mexican Americans interact and present their “Mexican-ness” on social media platforms such as Facebook. Articulating the Chicago School cannon with new considerations of social configuration of ICT social space engagement and formation, I sought to discuss the implications of self-presentation on social media platforms and the means and modes of articulating ethnic self-conceptualization of Self utilized by (some) Mexican-American Facebook users. This research also stemmed heavily from ethnographic work applied to the digital sphere. It is then, not surprisingly, that my research interest at the Doctoral level follows a similar line to this line of inquiry, now veered toward the border, the physical and symbolic barriers that face deportees. Specifically, I am interested in understanding and analyzing how Mexican deported men negotiate, situate and interact with the experiences of migration in the context of living in borderlands such as Tijuana, Mexico, whilst also housed in temporary male-exclusive shelters. Thinking of performed masculinity in the ideation of Self and Place in this liminal state of Nation-state is fundamental and seeks to address (and redress) the role of the experience of migration -notably, here, deportation- as structural ontological conditioning that has important considerations of migration research analysis. Understanding migrancy is also a means to approximate my experience within a comprehensible format and continue to engage with how the migrant experience shapes the forms and ways of “being” in the world.

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Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in Social and Political Sciences at the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) in Mexico City, where I am analyzing the phenomenology of migration experience through the life stories and perceptions of Mexican deported men currently housed in temporary male-exclusive migrant shelters in Tijuana. Through a transdisciplinary approach, I engage with the gendered constitution of migration phenomena and its role in masculine perspective and positions with a vibrant discussion from feminist epistemes and methodologies, especially feminist phenomenology. By engaging with the intersectional make-up of Being, I address the dominated aspect of the deported migrant in a borderscape such as Tijuana, highlighting the affective conditioning of being "torn" from a life and placed on the steps of an "Empire".

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​My interest in migration analysis is on reflexivity, positionality, feminist methodologies and epistemologies, the affective turn in migration analysis, migration theory, the role of emotions and the place, space and locality as part of borderscape and border studies.

I received my Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from San Francisco State University (SFSU) and a Master in Social Sciences from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) -Mexico. I am a Specialist in International Migration from the Colegio de la Frontera Norte and current PhD candidate in Social and Political Sciences from the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) with expected graduation date in 2023.

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