Alfiya Lyapina

Q1. Who are you?  

I call myself a desperate sociologist. I am desperate because I can’t do any other job other than being in academia and being a sociologist, and because I am desperately trying to get back on the academic track in a PhD program and defend my dissertation. 

Q2. What was your motivation for applying for the FFVT fellowship? Why Germany? 

Germany is one of the key countries I am considering for getting back on the PhD track, which is my main motivation in being a part of the FFVT program – from the very first days on being on the program I felt how useful it is for me – I receive significant advice from my supervisor Prof. Franck Düvell (in both substant part of my dissertation in progress and strategy in searching for the university and a supervisor and university I can potentially defend my dissertation at), a lot of networking thanks to regular seminars and lectures at IMIS and the budget IMIS provides for the traveling around Germany for the networking purposes. 

Q3. What do you expect from the fellowship? 

A lot of networking and advice. 

Q4. What is the focus of your work, and what is innovative about it? / What are your planned outcomes and activities for the fellowship period? And how do they relate to your FFVT hosting institution/ the FFVT cooperation project? 

I examine, how Syrian survival migrants in Russian capital, Moscow, managed to obtain and save their legal status in extremely limited structural conditions to do so. Drawing from six months of ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian survival migrants in Moscow and further online interviews, I conceptualized those conditions as a three- part "trap": first, extremely law chances to get humanitarian protection or alternative legal statuses, second, facing risk in the case of coming back, and third, limited opportunities to migrate further to third countries. I describe precisely the four Syrian immigrants' experiences (out of 27 people interviewed in total), from the visa obtaining and crossing the Russian border untill the current moment. They represent at the best the barriers all Syrian newcomers faced upon arrival in Russia and the ways they managed to overcome them in a very peculiar way. This research aims to put light on forced migrants' agency processing not only while making decision to migrate, but also acting upon arrival while facing limited structural conditions for doing so, while bridging the concepts of survival migration, which conceptualizes structural limitations of those fallen apart from refugee protection regime (Betts 2013), and the aspirations-capabilities framework (de Haas 2021), which highlights importance of migrants' agency regardless the existing categories of migration.