Paper details
| Paper authors | Alessandro Corso |
| In panel on | Resisting Border Violence: The Role of Civil Society, Local Actors, and Researchers |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
Whereas border deaths should be the exception, they have become the norm through which mobility is regulated and collective indifference towards migrants dying en route grows across the world’s most contested and hyper-militarized borderlands (De Genova 2017; Squire 2017). The aftermath of this violence is manifold and its impact on the neighbouring communities remains an important yet neglected topic in both scholarship and practice (Grotti and Brightman 2020; Zagaria 2020). The proposed article contributes to fill this gap by addressing how the remains of the migrants who die in the Central Mediterranean routes to Europe affect the lives of borderland communities, leaving traces in their stories, practices, and memories. By doing so, it re-frames border deaths from a local perspective, focusing on its border-less reverberations and considering it as a pervasive phenomenon that concerns not only the dead and their families, but Mediterranean societies at large. This inclusive approach challenges traditional narratives surrounding border deaths and invites scholars (and ideally the wider public) to confront the realities faced by those living at the deadliest borders in the world – the island of Lampedusa (Italy).
My ethnographic research is centred on strictly empirical data gathered around participant observation during several months of work with one of the oldest fishing crews on the island of Lampedusa. By exploring how these fishermen conduct their existence and by entering their life worlds with family members and friends as a new member of the crew, I propose to investigate how border deaths remain silenced or emerge through subtle moments, instances or anecdotes in ordinary life. I argue that migrants’ deaths are intimately connected to Southern European citizens’ lives, but that such webs of relations are hardly visible and importantly related to border policies which encourage indifference.
