2026 Keynote Lecture: Dr Kheira Arrouche, The Afterlives of Decolonisation

The talk investigates the racialisation of West and Central African migrants in Algeria; a state historically celebrated for its anti-colonial solidarity. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Oran and Algiers, it centres migrants lived experiences to reveal a pervasive landscape of everyday racism and dehumanisation. The analysis argues that Algerian racial formations exceed Euro-American binaries, operating through context-specific logics that render Blackness hyper-visible yet structurally excluded. The talk traces contemporary anti-Blackness to what I term the afterlives of decolonisation, through which the legacies of slavery, French colonisation, and religious hierarchies continue to shape racial formations in postcolonial Algeria, marginalising and erasing Black histories and presence within dominant Arab-Islamic national imaginaries. Ultimately, the talk reveals how a state forged through liberation struggle reproduces colonial structures of negation, casting Blackness as a threatening “other” within the Algerian society.

Kheira Arrouche is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the University College Cork. She leads the ERC funded MIGMOBS sub-project on African migration/mobilities in Ireland. The research examines the experiences of four key diasporas: Nigerian, Somali, Algerian, and South African, shedding light on how they negotiate Ireland's migration regime and transnational mobility networks. Kheira completed her PhD at the University of Leeds. Her work is ethnographic research on the lived experiences of West and Central African migrants stranded in transit in Algeria. It explores how they navigate stratified mobility regimes and negotiate the punitive borderlands and restrictive migration governance. Kheira was a visiting fellow at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds. Kheira’s research interests are on African migration and border politics, and irregular migration.