New book! “Crocevia Mediterraneo” a cura di Jacopo Anderlini ed Enrico Fravega

May 12 sees the release of “Crocevia Mediterraneo,” a collective logbook by a group of researchers from the Universities of Genoa and Parma involved in an ethnographic voyage into the heart of the Mediterranean Sea.

For the first time, a boat of social scientists sailed the migration routes of the central Mediterranean, making stopovers in the main hubs of European border control: Pantelleria, Lampedusa, Linosa, Malta. An unprecedented logbook that offers us a radically new look at the necropolitic violence of borders and the irreducible drive for mobility.

Dinghies, landings, patrol boats, NGOs, boatmen, etc. Borders spectacularization we have been experiencing in our daily lives, for years, tells only part of the story. The prevailing political-media narratives represent the Mediterranean as a “natural” barrier dividing geographically and socially distant areas. On the contrary, the Mediterranean is – historically – a space of encounter and contamination, as evidenced by this “field” work conducted aboard the Tanimar by a group of social scientists who gave voice and legitimacy to all those who cross it: migrants, fishermen, sailors, coast guards, islanders, and officials of European agencies. A research that by applying the criteria of a sociology understood as public practice proposes to rethink the “water frontier” of the Mediterranean. So that it is no longer a border arbitrarily drawn on the map, but returns to being a common space inhabited by a plurality of social actors who not only constantly call it into question, but are already prefiguring post-national futures capable of transcending state control of mobility.

The book, published by Eleuthera, is edited by Jacopo Anderlini (University of Parma) and Enrico Fravega (University of Genoa) and features contributions by: Guglielmo Agolino, Davide Cangelosi, Arianna Colombo, Luca Daminelli, Emanuela Fracassi, Luca Giliberti, Francesca Goletti, Daniela Leonardi, Antonino Milotta, Luca Queirolo Palmas, Vincenza Pellegrino, Filippo Torre and Veronica Valenti.