Martin Aucoin

Matriculated September 2020

Research Interests

West Africa, development, humanitarianism, international organizations, migration management

About

Martin is a first-year PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology He is interested in the development and humanitarian industries in West Africa, particularly as they attempt to manage contemporary migration flows to Europe and North America. Thus far, his work focuses on how and why international organizations, specifically the International Organization for Migration, mobilize the discourse of migration “crisis” and “irregularity” to intervene in The Gambia, the use of Wolof and Mandinka language songs, stories and multimedia to moralize these discourses, and the kinds of relationships these interventions create between the international organizations, West African governments and NGOs, and migrants themselves.

Awards & Grants

• Long-term Graduate Research in the United States Fellowship (GRUF). (Summer 2023).
• BU Department of Anthropology Summer Fieldwork Grant. (Summer 2023).
• BU GRS Summer Fellowship Grant. (Summer 2023).
• BU Center for Innovation in Social Science (CISS) Travel Awards. (Summer 2023).
• Long-term Graduate Research Abroad Fellowship (GRAF). (awarded Spring 2023).
• Boston University Department of Anthropology Summer Fieldwork Grant. (2022).
• American Ethnological Society (AES) Summer Fieldwork Grant. (2022).
• Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Summer Intensive Language Fellowship, Boston University African Studies Center. (2022).
• Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Academic Year Fellowship, Boston University African Studies Center. (2021-2022).
• Boston University Dean’s Fellowship. (Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2022).
• Explorers’ Club Washington Group Research Fieldwork Grant. (2019).

Publications

• Aucoin, M. (2022). “’You can make it here!’: Producing Europe’s mobile borders in the New Gambia. Political Geography (97): 102641.
• Aucoin, M. and M. Fry (2015). “Growing Local Food Movements: Farmers’ Markets as Nodes for Products and Community”. The Geographic Bulletin 56: 61-78.

Book Reviews

• Aucoin, M. (2022). “Hanna Horáková, Stephanie Rudwick, and Martin Schmiedl, eds. Africa on the Move: Shifting Identities, Histories, Boundaries. Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2020.” African Studies Review, 1-3.
• Aucoin, M. (2019). “Smuggling and Sovereignty: Individual agencies within the structures of human smuggling and enforcement in the Mediterranean”. Review of The Gray Zone by Feldman, G., 2019; and Human Smuggling in the Eastern Mediterranean by Baird, T., 2016. Geopolitics.