Antonio Sorge
Lecturer
Office: Founders 311
Phone: (416) 736-2100
Email: asorge@yorku.ca
Primary website: Academia.edu profile
Media Requests Welcome
Teaching and research interests: Political and historical anthropology; ethnicity and nationalism; anthropology of the state; globalization and transnationalism; migration; citizenship, belonging, and social exclusion; theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork; Southern Europe and the Mediterranean; Italy.
Antonio Sorge is a social anthropologist whose work centres on the state/society nexus, where a concern with the topics of social memory, politics of locality, histories of violence, crisis of liberalism, and undocumented migration figure prominently. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Sardinia and explored rural highland dissent vis-à-vis the Italian state, and his current SSHRC-supported research on refugee resettlement in Sicily considers the future of a Mediterranean island that is a key node of twenty-first century mobilities. He is presently authoring his second book, titled A Mediterranean Crossroads: Ruptured Modernity in Sicily.
Degrees
PhD, University of Calgary, 2006MA, Carleton University, 1999
BA, McGill University, 1997
Research Interests
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
Since 2011, ethnographic research on Sicily has examined how refugees are integrated within their host communities, as well as the roadblocks to successful recognition of the social, cultural, and economic needs of newcomers. A period of fieldwork on Lampedusa allowed me to examine the discordant dynamics of hospitality and anti-immigration sentiment at the local level, while on neighbouring Sicily I have examined the rising support for neo-nationalist right-wing movements within rural communities over the alleged demographic and cultural threat posed by refugees, as well as the rejection of this discourse by refugee rights advocates. This work also examines a broad-based movement in Italy to settle refugees in declining rural towns in order to secure the demographic viability of these sites, and includes specific attention to the reconfiguration of the island of Sicily as a place of both departures and arrivals, and indeed a transnational space defined by connections with a vibrant global Sicilian diaspora throughout Europe, the US, and Canada.
Funders:
SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2019)
2021. Emergent Axioms of Violence: Toward an Anthropology of Post-Liberal Modernity. Special issue of Anthropological Forum 31 (3): 1-16. (With Stavroula Pipyrou)
2015. Legacies of Violence: History, Society, and the State in Sardinia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2015. Resiting the Village. Special issue of Critique of Anthropology 35 (3). (Co-edited with Jonathan Padwe and Sara Shneiderman)
Navigating the Mediterranean Refugee “Crisis”: Alter-Globalization Activism and the Sediments of History on Lampedusa. In Andrea Smith, Kristín Loftsdóttir, and Brigitte Hipfl, eds. Messy Europe: Racialization and Crisis in a Postcolonial World, pp. 196-219. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
2014. Highland Sanctuary and the State: Mountains as a Political Category in Mediterranean History. In Allan C. Dawson, Laura Zanotti, and Ismael Vaccaro, eds. Negotiating Territoriality: Spatial Dialogues between State and Tradition, pp. 36-50. London: Routledge.
2021. Anxiety, Ambivalence, and the Violence of Expectations: Migrant Reception and Resettlement in Sicily. Anthropological Forum 31 (3).
2015. The Abandoned Village? Introduction to the Special Issue. Critique of Anthropology 35 (3): 235-47. (with Jonathan Padwe)
2015. The Past Sits in Places. Critique of Anthropology 35 (3): 263-79.
2012. Mobile Humanity: The Delocalization of Anthropological Research. Reviews in Anthropology 41 (4):1-29. (with Andrew P. Roddick)
2009. Hospitality, Friendship, and the Outsider in Highland Sardinia. Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe 9 (1):4-12.
2008. Divergent Visions: Localist and Cosmopolitan Identities in Highland Sardinia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14:808-24.
Teaching and research interests: Political and historical anthropology; ethnicity and nationalism; anthropology of the state; globalization and transnationalism; migration; citizenship, belonging, and social exclusion; theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork; Southern Europe and the Mediterranean; Italy.
Antonio Sorge is a social anthropologist whose work centres on the state/society nexus, where a concern with the topics of social memory, politics of locality, histories of violence, crisis of liberalism, and undocumented migration figure prominently. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Sardinia and explored rural highland dissent vis-à-vis the Italian state, and his current SSHRC-supported research on refugee resettlement in Sicily considers the future of a Mediterranean island that is a key node of twenty-first century mobilities. He is presently authoring his second book, titled A Mediterranean Crossroads: Ruptured Modernity in Sicily.
Degrees
PhD, University of Calgary, 2006MA, Carleton University, 1999
BA, McGill University, 1997
Research Interests
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
Since 2011, ethnographic research on Sicily has examined how refugees are integrated within their host communities, as well as the roadblocks to successful recognition of the social, cultural, and economic needs of newcomers. A period of fieldwork on Lampedusa allowed me to examine the discordant dynamics of hospitality and anti-immigration sentiment at the local level, while on neighbouring Sicily I have examined the rising support for neo-nationalist right-wing movements within rural communities over the alleged demographic and cultural threat posed by refugees, as well as the rejection of this discourse by refugee rights advocates. This work also examines a broad-based movement in Italy to settle refugees in declining rural towns in order to secure the demographic viability of these sites, and includes specific attention to the reconfiguration of the island of Sicily as a place of both departures and arrivals, and indeed a transnational space defined by connections with a vibrant global Sicilian diaspora throughout Europe, the US, and Canada.
Project Type: FundedRole: Principal Investigator
Funders:
SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2019)
All Publications
Navigating the Mediterranean Refugee “Crisis”: Alter-Globalization Activism and the Sediments of History on Lampedusa. In Andrea Smith, Kristín Loftsdóttir, and Brigitte Hipfl, eds. Messy Europe: Racialization and Crisis in a Postcolonial World, pp. 196-219. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
2014. Highland Sanctuary and the State: Mountains as a Political Category in Mediterranean History. In Allan C. Dawson, Laura Zanotti, and Ismael Vaccaro, eds. Negotiating Territoriality: Spatial Dialogues between State and Tradition, pp. 36-50. London: Routledge.
2021. Emergent Axioms of Violence: Toward an Anthropology of Post-Liberal Modernity. Special issue of Anthropological Forum 31 (3): 1-16. (With Stavroula Pipyrou)
2015. Legacies of Violence: History, Society, and the State in Sardinia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2015. Resiting the Village. Special issue of Critique of Anthropology 35 (3). (Co-edited with Jonathan Padwe and Sara Shneiderman)
2021. Anxiety, Ambivalence, and the Violence of Expectations: Migrant Reception and Resettlement in Sicily. Anthropological Forum 31 (3).
2015. The Abandoned Village? Introduction to the Special Issue. Critique of Anthropology 35 (3): 235-47. (with Jonathan Padwe)
2015. The Past Sits in Places. Critique of Anthropology 35 (3): 263-79.
2012. Mobile Humanity: The Delocalization of Anthropological Research. Reviews in Anthropology 41 (4):1-29. (with Andrew P. Roddick)
2009. Hospitality, Friendship, and the Outsider in Highland Sardinia. Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe 9 (1):4-12.
2008. Divergent Visions: Localist and Cosmopolitan Identities in Highland Sardinia. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14:808-24.
