Constructing mobile lifestyles between Europe and Africa: Sha'bi Moroccan men and new European nomads

This article focuses on the contemporary developments within the field of transnational mobility between Europe and Western Africa, with particular focus on Morocco. Our ethnographic data regarding emerging forms of mobile lifestyles in the region indicates that the global economic recession beginning in 2008, together with restrictive migration and border policy in the EU, have had far-reaching consequences to the patterns and the cultural logic of transnational mobility in the Western Mediterranean. It has become increasingly difficult to conseptualise some of these the newly emergent mobile lifestyles in the conventional analytic terminology of migration and mobility studies. Our aim is to demonstrate this by offering ethnographic insights into the transnational movement of popular class (sha´bi ) Moroccan men, who arrived in Spain as irregular migrants in the 1990s, and new European nomads who engage in a mobile life between Europe, Morocco and other parts of Western Africa.