Cecilia Vergnano (KU Leuven). Alpine Border Conflict: Migration and Social Polarization in the Everyday Life of Intra-EU Borders
| Dates: | 17 February 2025 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Cecilia Vergnano |
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Since 2015, the reintroduction of (racialised) border controls within the supposedly border-free Schengen area and, in particular, at northern Italian borders – envisaged to contain asylum seekers’ so-called “secondary movements” within the EU – gave rise to uncountable migrants’ deaths at intra-EU borders (as well as unquantifiable suffering), which are all the more striking as they take place at the core of the allegedly liberal and human-rights-compliant western Europe. At the same time, different categories of social actors – not only migrants on the move but also border security officers, local administrators, activists and local residents – enacted a series of transgressions, desertions, disobediences, deliberate breakings of laws, and “subversive humanitarianism” (Vandevoordt and Verschraegen 2019). Based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2017 and 2024 at three strategic border areas (at the French/Italian and Austrian/Italian borders), my research is articulated around the question of the societal transformations brought about by the EU governance of borders and migration. Which practices emerged from below to challenge restrictive migration and mobility regimes? And how did states and supranational institutions, in turn, respond to such contentious practices? More generally, how can the expansion (in a restrictive sense) of the EU border regime be used as a heuristic device to grasp the emergence of new borders, boundaries, fractures, and schisms within the very EU societies? The book explores how EU migration and border policies not only govern migrants but also shape receiving societies by promoting the emergence of tensions, conflicts and schismogenetic social dynamics (polarization). Beyond the tensions between practices of border reinforcement and practices of border crossing, the book focuses on the tensions between market and security forces, between radical antiracist politics and the risk of reproducing racialised hierarchies, and between different understandings of solidarity among the traditional basis of the Left (now divided into the social basis of the “New Left” and the social basis of reactionary populism).
Speaker
Cecilia Vergnano
Organisation: KU Leuven
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Room 6.210
University Place
Manchester
