A presentation by Martina Tazzioli and Noemi Bergesio, University of Bologna. This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium under the „Transforming Migration Governance: Towards a Solidarity-based Approach“ cluster hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
This paper starts from the consideration that in a time of socio-political fragmentation, it is paramount to interrogate how solidarity movements might help us in re-composing and building up common worlds. The violent erasure of both migrants’ spaces and of “memory traces” (Didi-Huberman, 2002) about the obduracy of border violence, complicates the possibilities of building up collective formations which might coalesce around struggles for liveability. Tracing commonalities among solidarity movements and putting in place transversal alliances is no longer sufficient for facing the dismantling of life-support infrastructures that migrants and (some) citizens experience. Drawing on the concept of precarious world-making practices, the paper investigates how solidarity movements by and with migrants have built up and sedimented ways of being in common and have transmitted such knowledge across space and in time. What characterises world-making practices in the realm of migration containment is their precarity and exposure to both memory and physical erasure; and, yet, despite their instability, something is sedimented and is transmitted over time, shaping a sort of “common wind” (Scott, 2018). The paper zooms into the French-Italian Alpine border, taking into account the solidarity practices that French and Italian citizens have engaged with, on both sides of the frontier: they have put in place mobile infrastructures of solidarity, which include migrant refuges, counter-mapping practices and medical and logistical support to migrants’ movements. While these experiences of solidarities have been already investigated, both by journalists and scholars, in this paper I am interested in looking at them as precarious world-making practices, exploring how they have facilitated or inspired other solidarity movements, and which common worlds they have contributed to shape.
The presentation by Martina Tazzioli and Noemi Bergesio will be followed by a discussant’s contribution by Cetta Mainwaring (University of Edinburgh), and a Q&A session with attendees.
Prior registration is required. Registered attendees will receive the dial-in details prior to the event. Please register here.
