Project 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.
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Funded
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Principal Investigator
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(e.g type 1000 for 1,000)
