Félicien de Heusch awarded a Fulbright scholarship to do research in California at UCLA
Félicien de Heusch, a researcher at ULiège's CEDEM (Centre for Ethnicity and Migration Studies), has just been awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to spend six months at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) within the Latin American Institute (LAI). His project, "Becoming a legal street vendor: opportunities, obstacles and inequalities among migrants in Los Angeles", will be supervised by Dr. Rubén Hernández-Léon and will begin in January 2024.
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The ‘survival’ activity of street vending and its practice by migrants represents a hyper-visible and challenging phenomenon in many global cities. With approximately 50,000 street vendors, the case of Los Angeles attests to the phenomenon’s significance. The 2018 groundbreaking shift in local policies for legal street vending permits represents opportunities but challenges for many undocumented street vendors who have faced increasing hardships since the COVID-19 pandemic. Through an ethnographic study of migrant street vendors’ interactions with bureaucrats in LA, this research aims to analyze the implementation of the new regulating framework and its variable distribution. Revealing the inclusion/exclusion processes migrant street vendors face in LA, therefore, displays the way public space is regulated and offers comparative grounds for the management of multicultural cities around the world.
Félicien’s research attests of his preoccupation with migration, street vending and social protection. Before conducting his stay at UCLA, he will defend on November 28th 2023 at ULiège his doctoral thesis entitled “Mobilizing for and by the dead: An ethnography of the transnational management of Senegalese migrants’ death in Europe” conducted within the ERC project “Migration, Transnationalism and Social Protection in (post-) crisis Europe”, under the direction of Dr. Jean-Michel Lafleur.
