Abstract
After decades of labor migration and the consolidation of the transnational welfare state, several EU countries have built up legislative frameworks that allow the export of contributory pensions outside of the EU. After a migrant's death, pensions can be transferred to qualified family survivors. Yet little is known regarding the procedures, channels, and mechanisms through which pensions are accessed by survivors living outside of the EU. This project seeks to fill this research gap by closely examining how social protection granted by EU countries is negotiated long after migrants' death and far away from European welfare states by survivors' pensions. Theoretically, the project aims to innovatively test the concept of Postmortem Transnational Social Protection (PTSP). Building on a multi-sited ethnography between Senegal, France, Spain and Italy, its originality and contribution to the scholarship on transnational social protection derives from the project's objectives goals of: 1) understanding how PTSP works in practice via in-depth examination of the implementation of survivors' pensions in Senegal through the interaction between Spanish, Italian, and French authorities with Senegalese local authorities, survivors, and private actors and; 2) identifying the effects and perceptions shaping PTSP by examining survivors' experiences and by reconstructing their life course narratives and representations regarding these pensions.
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