Soft Infrastructures

How are mobilities mediated in contexts where the movement of people has a long and central history, and how do we account for their gendered, generational, and classed differentiation? Through the concept of soft infrastructures, we suggest that the facilitation of regional labor mobilities in West Africa rely to a considerable extent not only on personal social networks, but on broadly shared cultural notions of friendship, solidarity, and occupational specialization. We further emphasize the centrality of smaller urban centers as nodes in regional mobility regimes, and offer empirical illustrations of the ways in which migrants make use of, and are restricted by, the sociocultural mediation of mobilities.