“The Alpine area is a passage connecting and keeping together different valleys crisscrossed by borders and diverse memories of unfulfilled futures kept alive by the encounters between solidarity networks and people on the move.”
Until the second half of the 20th century, Italians clandestinely crossed the border through the Occitan Alps in order to seek work in France; today, the same paths are used by migrants – mainly coming from the Balkan Route or the Central Mediterranean Route – according to a symbolic and material logics that structures the migratory chains beyond legal definitions and boundaries. Therefore, it is possible to explore practices and discourses of “debordering” in this space, constituting its porosity, looking for the links between memories of the border’s past and visions of its future. The aim is to understand how past migrants’ illegalized transits are deeply rooted in collective memory and inscribed in the solidarity practices that allow mountain border crossing today. This approach aims at de-emphasizing current irregular crossing and studying migration through new categories to de-nationalize contemporary migration issues.
Furthermore, we are interested in exploring mountain border crossing in relation to narratives on the “adverse natural context” – particularly, regarding the “duty to rescue” and the identification of “places of safety” –, factors that are integral part of the social and cultural identity of these areas, similarly to sea border zones. In fact, international law identifies a Search and Rescue zone as an area where there is a duty to rescue: an imperative principle of social solidarity and protection. Despite this, rescue operations conducted in such areas have been over time hindered by Italian law enforcement who ended up repressing and criminalizing any rescue activity, which is then carried out in violation of Italian law but in compliance with international law. In this sense, we aim at investigating the symbolic and normative continuity existing between solidarity in mountain and sea areas following an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together a sociological, anthropological and legal gaze.
Vincenza Pellegrino is Associate Professor of Sociology of Cultural Processes and at the University of Parma (Department of Law, Political and International Studies), where she teaches Sociology of Globalization and Social Policies. She is deputy President of the degree courses in Social Services and in Social Policy Planning; directs a specialization course (Advanced course) in Participatory Public Welfare; she is Delegate of the Rector for teaching and research at the Parma Penitentiary Institutes (P.U.P. UniPR). Her most recent research topics are: transnational migrations, postcolonial intercultural social relations, with particular attention to gender dimensions and female subjectivities (plural feminisms); the political imaginary and the future as a “cultural fact” (the studies of the future within the studies on contemporary political civic participation); the transformations of the welfare state in a participatory way.
Jacopo Anderlini (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Parma and he is part of the Visual Sociology Laboratory of the University of Genoa. His main research interests revolve around border studies, refugee studies, migration, critical theory on technologies, social and political philosophy. His work mixes qualitative methods and ethnography – with both multi-sited and digital fieldwork – and critical theoretical reflection. He investigates the transformations of the government of mobility, its infrastructures and logistics, at the southern borders of Europe. He is part of the international academic network on critical migration and border studies Kritnet, of the international academic network at the crossroads between Science and Technology Studies and Critical Migration STS-MIGTEC and is co-founder of the research group on the analysis of digital technologies C.I.R.C.E..
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