P Boccagni
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 45221 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | P Boccagni |
| NOMBRES | P |
| APELLIDO | Boccagni |
| FIRMA | BOCCAGNI P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Trento |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8379-8561 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 75 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 749 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 74 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2010 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 17 |
No Destination? Unveiling the Traces of the Future Among Young Asylum Seekers in “Waithood”
What is the future like for young men who feel spatially and temporally stuck, like dozens of thousands who fled West Africa and reached Europe over the last decade, only to end up in the “waithood” of asylum reception? Is there any meaningful destination ahead of them? On the surface, their social and legal precarity is hard to reconcile with future aspirations, let alone anticipations. However, the alluring vision of a future “good life”, which…
What Undoing Nothing does
Research on forced immobility, as part and parcel of forced migration, can make a difference conceptually, societally and biographically. With this goal in mind, Undoing Nothing illustrates, respectively, the transcontextual significance of notions such as ambivalence, nothing and relevance; the emergence of forced irrelevance as a mode of sovereign power, and an instance of the analytical and political struggles between what is (to be) foregroun…
On the (past) verge of death
Against the necropolitical background of border deaths and disappearances, in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, lie the lives and stories of the survivors – hundreds of thousands of border-crossers who were spared the same ending, struggle to get settled in a safe country and are typically reluctant to tell or represent all things past. Their societal marginalization invites us to challenge the ordinary ‘division of labour’ on what should be made …
Response to Tom Scott-Smith’s Review of Undoing Nothing
than viewing asylum seekers as passive recipients of state power, Boccagni shows how they reconstitute moral worth and political visibility from below.Above all, he succeeds in showing how refugees seek to undo that sense of suspension-the way they strive to "produce relevance" in a condition of institutional irrelevance
Remittances’ in question
Migrant remittances play a pivotal role in sustaining the livelihoods of many families and the economies of emigration countries. Most of the scholarship, however, tends to take this notion as self-evident. In fact, people who send money home do not necessarily use it. They may even be unfamiliar with the term. We investigate this apparent contradiction, drawing from a qualitative study on people belonging to the Palestinian diaspora in Italy. As…
YouTubing Remittances, Revealing (Dis)connectedness
Sending and receiving remittances is central to the negotiation of transnational family life, and to nourishing a sense of copresence among physically distant parties. Although the lived experience of this transaction has a very intimate and personal basis, it is also subject to increasing visual and public representation, as a part of the working of dedicated migration industries. Based on an in-depth exploration of the advertising materials on …
Challenging ungrievability for people missing at sea. Search infrastructures, spaces of public mourning, and claims for justice
Since the so-called refugee crisis, the central Mediterranean Sea has been identified as the deadliest border in the world. As the critical border studies debate has shown, these deaths reflect the structural violence of border regimes and demand due forms of political accountability and responsibility. At the same time, dominant power structures differentially shape the visibility and grievability of those who are missing and dead at the border,…
Dreaming of a Remittance House
Migrant housing investments in the countries of origin are a demonstration of their transnational engagement and their potential contribution to local development. Yet, these investments remain relatively understudied on a large scale. In this paper, we explore three related questions on the drivers, prevalence, and development of transnational housing, drawing on an original survey of Ecuadorian and Indian migrants in different European cities. …
Haunting Homes and Emerging Dilemmas of Being in the World
Home ‘haunts’ in much fiction literature, as the contributors to this volume of ZAA reveal by engaging in fruitful conversation with the scholarship on migration, displacement, exile, settler colonialism, and human/non-human relations, on all scales from local to global. This commentary underlines the promise of more extended exchanges between art, humanities, and social sciences in home studies . This is critical to make sense of the myriad imag…
Handbook on Home and Migration
‘This comprehensive, insightful, beautiful collection opens a window into the multiple, everyday meanings of “home” under conditions of migration and displacement. Exceptionally well-integrated, the collection invites us to a fascinating conversation about home across vast geographies, disciplines, and methods. Indispensable reading for anyone who cares about home.’ – Cecilia Menjivar, University of California, US
Domestic religion and the migrant home
Migrants’ home, as a notion and a set of related experiences and locations across countries, is subject to an increasing research interest. Little of this, however, has looked at their ways to circulate and emplace religion, through portable beliefs, artifacts, and practices, as a form of home-making. Likewise, little of the debate on home and migration has explored the home, not just in terms of housing conditions or material cultures, but as an…
Calibrating home, hospitality and reciprocity in migration
Hospitality, as an analytic and a lived experience, is central to the day-to-day workings of home, and to managing the tensions and contradictions inherent in place attachment and appropriation on any scale - from the domestic to the national one. This emerges as a contentious and yet under-researched social question whenever newcomers such as immigrants and refugees lay some claim for guesthood. Following this premise, and based also on our fiel…
Homemaking in Superdiverse Public Space
This chapter invites a systematic exploration of the interplay between superdiversity and homemaking in the public urban space. The notion of home, as a form of special place attachment, also involves the public sphere and lies at the root of contrasting ways of perceiving, claiming, and using public sphere. Drawing on a literature review and original research on home and migration, this chapter discusses the factors whereby different social acto…
Selling a house, staging a dream
Migrants’ transnational housing investments are a relatively overlooked field to explore the workings of so-called migration industries, as we do, in this paper, through a case study of Ecuadorian migration. Based on fieldwork with two real estate agencies in Madrid and visits to their housing projects in Quito, we show how these companies support Ecuadorians’ collective socio-cultural practices in Madrid, in order to capitalise on their potentia…
Introduzione. Disabilità e migrazione. Gli studi in Italia
Nei processi migratori le persone con disabilità sono pressoché invisibili per quanto esposte a rischi crescenti di discriminazione negativa; riconoscere tale discriminazione multipla non e` semplice perché spesso e` implicita, nascosta dentro le prassi istituzionali e giuridiche, e non percepita come tale dalla stessa persona che ne è vittima. La conoscenza di questo fenomeno è parziale a tutti i livelli: la letteratura internazionale è limitata…
Entering into domestic hospitality for refugees
Grassroots refugee hospitality is an innovative, if still little investigated field of practices, which illuminates and reshapes the native/immigrant divide. It also sheds light on ‘domestic humanitarianism’, as a range of everyday modes of helping that take place even in the domestic space. Drawing on a case study in Northern Italy, this article develops a framework on the societal implications of refugee hospitality, based on a multi-scalar vie…
Stayhome’ as a YouTube performance
What does ‘staying at home’ mean, and how is it represented online, once it suddenly becomes a legal obligation? This article explores the ways to display and resignify the domestic space through the frames of YouTube during the first nationwide lockdown in Italy in spring 2020. While being enforced at home, and possibly as a way to cope with this, YouTube creators perceive, display and (re)adapt their dwellings in contrasting ways along the cont…
You’re Always in Transit, but the House Stays”
Unravelling the emotional and relational bases of migrant transnational housing is an emerging challenge for research on home, family and migration. Based on a house biography in Cuenca, Ecuador, this paper reconstructs how a transnational family strived to preserve their past house by renovating it as a bed-and-breakfast. Building on narrative and ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how far a house with a commercial purpose and no permanent dwell…
Migration, Borders and “De-bordering” in Pandemic Times
The Covid-19 pandemic has deeply affected the configuration of border regimes worldwide, resulting in further selective restrictions to individual cross border mobilities. The Mediterranean space, where sea-crossings have been a structural part of migration for over two decades, has been targeted by multidimensional and transversal re-bordering policies: from externalization to search and rescue, from asylum to detention. The “unsafe harbour stra…
Exposing the private, engaging in the public. Asylum seekers, intimate publics and normative performances of public participation
By bringing together scholarship on affective (non)citizenship and critical geographies of public space, in this article we examine how the exposure of refugees’ intimate lives, private relationalities and personal histories mediate their conditional access to “the public”. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement in the field of asylum in Italy, we show how asylum seekers are confronted with changing patterns of obligation and dependency in …
Homing
This article is a conceptual invitation to homing, to revisit the everyday social experience of home as a situated manifestation of lifelong needs and desires for space appropriation. Through acts of homing and their accumulation over space and time, people articulate a tension to ‘move’ towards a place or condition they construct as home, engaging in a dialectic relation between the experienced and aspired socio-material, relational and cultural…
Of home-comings and home-scales
Is return migration a form of 'homecoming', as common sense would have it? While increasing research has addressed both its determinants and the underlying lived experience, still lacking is a systematic revisit of return through the prism of home studies. Based on a multiscalar approach to home and on our fieldwork into Ecuadorian migration, we explore return as a life transition between separate geographic spaces and biographical times; in esse…
Do Objects (Re)produce Home among International Migrants
Ordinary objects can play a significant role in the making and reproduction of home, as an emplaced set of emotions, memories and relationships, among international migrants. Based on qualitative research with Ecuadorians and Peruvians in Britain, Italy and Spain, we show how certain objects, by virtue of their evocative power, help migrants to transform their dwelling places into homely environments (home making), and/or retain connections with …
The Neighbourhood as Home Away from Home
Home, as a special attachment to (and appropriation over) place, can also be cultivated in the public urban space, under certain conditions that we explore through a case study in Rinkeby, Stockholm. This article analyses various forms of homemaking in the public among the Somali-Swedes who live there. It shows how, in the case of vulnerable immigrants, a neighbourhood feels like home insofar as it facilitates a continuity with their past ways of…
Migration and the Search for Home
(Super)diversity and the migration-social work nexus
The notions of diversity and superdiversity are of promising relevance to social work with immigrant clients. They enable a nuanced appreciation of the complex and varied sources of inequality to which such clients are exposed. However, these categories are sometimes employed in overly principled or prescriptive tones, and their distinctive contribution is relatively under-debated. How can diversity and superdiversity be used to make sense of mig…
What’s in a (Migrant) House? Changing Domestic Spaces, the Negotiation of Belonging and Home-making in Ecuadorian Migration
Migrants’ constructions of their domestic spaces, and their struggle to feel at home in both receiving and sending societies, are an emerging focus of research in migration studies. Housing issues are also a privileged observatory on their transnational social engagement, as well as on the changing boundaries of their membership and belonging. This article addresses the everyday bases of their home-making and house-building practices, drawing on …
Burden, blessing or both? On the mixed role of transnational ties in migrant informal social support
This article revisits migrants' informal social support by exploring their exchanges of material and immaterial resources with the family members left behind. The latter are typically constructed as net beneficiaries of migrants' struggles for a livelihood abroad, and even as a potential constraint on their self-realization. Building on a qualitative study of Ecuadorian domestic workers in Italy, the author explores - instead - whether left-behin…
Immigrants and home in the making
The search for home as a material and symbolic space is an increasingly salient social question across contemporary multiethnic cities. The boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic are increasingly contested and yet remain a crucial issue, especially for minority groups such as immigrant and ethnic communities. The domestication of everyday living spaces carried out by immigrant and ethnic groups entails a variety of ways of 'cult…
Reminiscences, Patriotism, Participation
The paper explores the meanings and effects of external voting in the context of a recent migration flow ‐‐ of Ecuadorian migrants to Italy ‐‐ approached through an original fieldwork investigation. During the first long‐distance voting experience of Ecuadorian immigrants, in October 2006, an exploratory survey was conducted in the cities hosting polls in Italy. This provided an opportunity for an inquiry into the motivations and expectations und…
Rethinking transnational studies
Once an alternative approach to the mainstream, transnationalism has gained increasing currency and salience in migration studies. What is left of its theoretical import, however, after establishing that proper transnational activities, aside from remittances, are relatively infrequent; and that such practices are not incompatible with - and are even facilitated by - successful integration overseas? This article contends that the theoretical tool…
Aspirations and the subjective future of migration
Migrants' aspirations are a meaningful and under-appreciated research subject. My paper investigates their development and implications over the life course, building on an archive of life stories of immigrant domestic workers in Italy. It dissects the biographical bases of aspirations as ways of cultivating open representations of the future; hence, as a window on migrants' potential to shape the future itself, given their assets, the external s…
Transnational Politics as Cultural Circulation
This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on transnational politics by bringing tools used by scholars of cultural diffusion and circulation into these debates. We build on research on social remittances and their potential to yield broader and deeper effects or to ‘scale up’ and ‘scale out.’ Based on a variety of empirical examples, we propose that processes such as circulation, portability, and contact, viewed through a transnationa…
Integration and the struggle to turn space into “our” place
This article investigates homemaking as a set of practices and a perspective on migrants’ ways of local incorporation, with its own material, emotional and relational underpinnings. Homemaking has the potential to emerge as an original category of analysis in immigrant integration, moving beyond the contraposition between assimilationism and transnationalism. Based also on our ongoing research, both in the United States and in Europe, we argue fo…
Homing
This article is a conceptual invitation to homing, to revisit the everyday social experience of home as a situated manifestation of lifelong needs and desires for space appropriation. Through acts of homing and their accumulation over space and time, people articulate a tension to ‘move’ towards a place or condition they construct as home, engaging in a dialectic relation between the experienced and aspired socio-material, relational and cultural…
Practising Motherhood at a Distance
This article builds on an ethnographic study of a migration flow linking Ecuador and Italy. Through personal relationships built up during fieldwork, I was able to delve into the changing interactions between migrant mothers and the children they leave behind, looking also at constructions of ‘mothering at a distance’ in both their host and their home societies. For migrant women, practising transnational motherhood entails communicating frequent…
Urban Multiculturalism beyond the ‘Backlash
All across European receiving societies, the mainstream political discourse is displaying increasing disaffection with multiculturalism. It is primarily at the level of local policies, though, that the social inclusion of immigrants and the governance of ethno-cultural diversity are negotiated. Building on a comparative study of the urban ‘adaptations’ of multiculturalism in eight European cities, this article addresses three questions: (1) the c…
Migration and the Global Crisis
This article explores the impact of the current recession on Ecuadorian labour migration to Europe. Several factors affect the evolution of this migration system: receiving countries' policies, the labour market demand (and its deterioration) and the scope for the self-maintenance of migrants' social networks. We especially focus on a relatively less studied issue: emigrant policies, symbolised, in Ecuador, by a pervasive emphasis on migrant retu…
Building Democracy or Reproducing 'Ecuadoreanness'? A Transnational Exploration of Ecuadorean Migrants' External Voting
Ecuador has emerged as a good case study of the interactions between diasporas and their countries of origin. The recent enactment of external voting rights has mirrored a novel political discourse which emphasises the positive contribution of 'emigrant brothers' and their unbroken allegiance to their homeland. Expatriate reactions to these new political developments are at the core of our article, which heuristically reconstructs the social root…
Home in question
What is the opposite of home? Is it necessarily something ‘negative’? Similar questions, far from having a self-evident answer, make for a fruitful entry point for research into the social experience of home. Central to this article is a novel conceptualization of non-home, against the background of the pre-existing criticisms of the normative, romanticized and depoliticized understandings of home. This article draws from fieldwork on the everyda…
For a comparative sociology of home
Home matters, for people's everyday life and for social research, in ways that are still lacking a systematic sociological framework of analysis. As a contribution toward this framework, we define home as an emplaced relationship that prioritizes certain socio-material contexts over others, by virtue of the emotional, affective and practical values attached to them, in forms and degrees that change over space and time. This understanding highligh…
Migrants' social protection as a transnational process
Boccagni P. Migrants' social protection as a transnational process: public policies and emigrant initiative in the case of Ecuador Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 318–325 © 2010 The Author(s), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. The article explores social protection as a transnational welfare process for migrants from Ecuador in Italy. It focuses specifically on the…
From the multi-sited to the in-between
Multi-sited ethnography has been extensively applied to migrants’ transnational family life and to the underlying care practices. Its methodological underpinnings and dilemmas, though, are relatively under-reflected. How can the relational and affective spaces between migrants and left-behind kin be ethnographically appreciated? Against this question, I revisit my fieldwork on a migration flow between Ecuador and Italy. This is an instance of the…
Whom should We Help First?” Transnational Helping Practices in Ecuadorian Migration
Collective remittances, in the framework of migrant transnationalism, have been recently dealt with in some empirical research, especially on the Mexican‐US migration system. Far less studied is their significance in different migration flows, including their real contribution – as desirable as this may be – to local development. The article is concerned with a bottom up analysis of a migration flow where collective remittances – as the only way …
Addressing transnational needs through migration? An inquiry into the reach and consequences of migrants’ social protection across borders
This article draws a conceptual map of the mechanisms, dynamics and consequences of transnational social protection (TSP) for low-skilled labour migrants and their family members. While migrants’ social needs have also a transnational side, the responses of welfare institutions, if available at all, are typically territorialised. This brings to the fore the prospects for TSP of those affected by migration – most notably, here, migrants’ dear ones…
Introduction
Ambivalence as an interpretive tool in sociology refers to the social experience of any complex, cognitively confusing, or emotionally charged phenomenon that calls simultaneously for opposite reactions. Migrants’ life conditions, as this Special Issue illustrates, are particularly subject to ambivalence. This introduction reviews the predominant understandings of ambivalence as a sociological category, its specific relevance in migration studies…
Blurred Rights, Local Practices
This article analyses the role of professional social workers in managing immigrant clients' needs in Italy, against a background of residual welfare provision, inconsistent immigrant policies and piecemeal integration. After framing the main challenges migration poses to the Italian welfare system, with particular regard to social services, we highlight the centrality of practitioners' commitment and discretionary power in addressing migrants' n…
At Home in the Restaurant
Making and consuming food are evident aspects in migrants' construction and reproduction of memory, identity and belonging. Food consumption can also enable migrants to make themselves at home abroad by reproducing aspects of their past and relating them to particular places in the present. This article draws from ethnographic work in Ecuadorian restaurants in Madrid to investigate the 'domestication' of space through their material culture. It e…
On the theoretical potential of 'remittance houses
Migrant houses in countries of origin, referred to as ‘remittance houses’, are a visible marker of emigration. Case studies from diverse geographic contexts have explored their functions. Unlike the surrounding built environment, these houses span the local and transnational realities of migrant lives, while being grounded in specific places. We argue, first, for the need to move beyond locally-oriented reifying descriptions of what is a global p…
Caring about migrant care workers
This article makes a case for investigating the needs of migrant women as transnational mothers, and the sources of social support accessible to them. Much has been written on migrants’ homebound commitments and obligations in terms of transnational caregiving, care chains, and the like. Less analysed are the consequences on their personal needs and demands, which are out of synch with the territorially-based social welfare provision of either se…
Migrants' social protection as a transnational process
Boccagni P. Migrants' social protection as a transnational process: public policies and emigrant initiative in the case of Ecuador Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: 318–325 © 2010 The Author(s), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. The article explores social protection as a transnational welfare process for migrants from Ecuador in Italy. It focuses specifically on the…
Whom should We Help First?” Transnational Helping Practices in Ecuadorian Migration
Collective remittances, in the framework of migrant transnationalism, have been recently dealt with in some empirical research, especially on the Mexican‐US migration system. Far less studied is their significance in different migration flows, including their real contribution – as desirable as this may be – to local development. The article is concerned with a bottom up analysis of a migration flow where collective remittances – as the only way …
From rapport to collaboration . . . and beyond? Revisiting field relationships in an ethnography of Ecuadorian migrants
The article revisits my personal relationships with fieldwork members in an ethnography on transnational migration between Ecuador and Italy. As this focused on the social relationships and practices that may connect emigrants with their motherland, the import of my interpersonal relationships was a crucial one. In reflecting on their development and impingements, I draw on three interpretive categories: respect, in terms of reciprocal recognitio…
Reminiscences, Patriotism, Participation
The paper explores the meanings and effects of external voting in the context of a recent migration flow ‐‐ of Ecuadorian migrants to Italy ‐‐ approached through an original fieldwork investigation. During the first long‐distance voting experience of Ecuadorian immigrants, in October 2006, an exploratory survey was conducted in the cities hosting polls in Italy. This provided an opportunity for an inquiry into the motivations and expectations und…
Migration and the Global Crisis
This article explores the impact of the current recession on Ecuadorian labour migration to Europe. Several factors affect the evolution of this migration system: receiving countries' policies, the labour market demand (and its deterioration) and the scope for the self-maintenance of migrants' social networks. We especially focus on a relatively less studied issue: emigrant policies, symbolised, in Ecuador, by a pervasive emphasis on migrant retu…
The framing of return from above and below in Ecuadorian migration
Although return migration is a significant topic in current policy, the competing interests of sending and destination countries in promoting it and the prospects of making return strategies 'from above' a viable and desirable option for migrants are relatively neglected topics. In this article, I explore the distinct agendas, meanings and expectations underlying the prospects of return migration from Ecuador to Italy. I approach this recent migr…
Practising Motherhood at a Distance
This article builds on an ethnographic study of a migration flow linking Ecuador and Italy. Through personal relationships built up during fieldwork, I was able to delve into the changing interactions between migrant mothers and the children they leave behind, looking also at constructions of ‘mothering at a distance’ in both their host and their home societies. For migrant women, practising transnational motherhood entails communicating frequent…
Revisiting the "Transnational" in Migration Studies
After decades of extensive discussion and a number of empirical studies, the transnational approach is by now well established in migration studies. An open contraposition still exists however between its supporters and its detractors. As an attempt to move beyond it, this paper argues for the need to still elaborate on the sociological bases of this perspective in four respects: its underlying definitional issues, the nexus between its conceptua…
Rethinking transnational studies
Once an alternative approach to the mainstream, transnationalism has gained increasing currency and salience in migration studies. What is left of its theoretical import, however, after establishing that proper transnational activities, aside from remittances, are relatively infrequent; and that such practices are not incompatible with - and are even facilitated by - successful integration overseas? This article contends that the theoretical tool…
Mapping social remittances
The notion of social remittances has gained a central position, discursively at least, in the literature on the effects of emigration on home societies. In this editorial we briefly review the strengths and limitations that this concept has displayed, since its early coinage in transnational migration studies. More of-ten than not, social remittances have been treated in the literature in a peripheral vein, ancillary to different foci of research…
What’s in a (Migrant) House? Changing Domestic Spaces, the Negotiation of Belonging and Home-making in Ecuadorian Migration
Migrants’ constructions of their domestic spaces, and their struggle to feel at home in both receiving and sending societies, are an emerging focus of research in migration studies. Housing issues are also a privileged observatory on their transnational social engagement, as well as on the changing boundaries of their membership and belonging. This article addresses the everyday bases of their home-making and house-building practices, drawing on …
Building Democracy or Reproducing 'Ecuadoreanness'? A Transnational Exploration of Ecuadorean Migrants' External Voting
Ecuador has emerged as a good case study of the interactions between diasporas and their countries of origin. The recent enactment of external voting rights has mirrored a novel political discourse which emphasises the positive contribution of 'emigrant brothers' and their unbroken allegiance to their homeland. Expatriate reactions to these new political developments are at the core of our article, which heuristically reconstructs the social root…
Making the ‘Fifth Region’ a real place? Emigrant policies and the emigration-nation nexus in Ecuador
Ecuadorian migration has emerged as a good case study on the pro-active orientations of sending countries toward expatriates, as an attempt to retain their allegiance, connectedness, and investments. Drawing on the discourses and policies of the Correa government in Ecuador, this paper aims to explore the effects of emigration on the national ‘self-understandings’ of sending countries and on their nation-building projects. Three theoretical quest…
From the multi-sited to the in-between
Multi-sited ethnography has been extensively applied to migrants’ transnational family life and to the underlying care practices. Its methodological underpinnings and dilemmas, though, are relatively under-reflected. How can the relational and affective spaces between migrants and left-behind kin be ethnographically appreciated? Against this question, I revisit my fieldwork on a migration flow between Ecuador and Italy. This is an instance of the…
Caring about migrant care workers
This article makes a case for investigating the needs of migrant women as transnational mothers, and the sources of social support accessible to them. Much has been written on migrants’ homebound commitments and obligations in terms of transnational caregiving, care chains, and the like. Less analysed are the consequences on their personal needs and demands, which are out of synch with the territorially-based social welfare provision of either se…
Blurred Rights, Local Practices
This article analyses the role of professional social workers in managing immigrant clients' needs in Italy, against a background of residual welfare provision, inconsistent immigrant policies and piecemeal integration. After framing the main challenges migration poses to the Italian welfare system, with particular regard to social services, we highlight the centrality of practitioners' commitment and discretionary power in addressing migrants' n…
I'm not like all these Ecuadorians'. Promises and dilemmas of immigrants' selective ethnicity appropriation
This article revisits my translocal ethnography of Ecuadorian immigration to Italy, building on the notions of ethnicization and selective ethnicity appropriation. The salience of an ethnic dimension, in the daily lives of the migrants I met, is explored with regard to collective identification, alignment with co-nationals and interactions with natives. By de-constructing migrants’ ethnicity from within, a range of expectations and strategies tow…
Emotions on the move
One (Slender) Tree, Many (Social) Roots
Immigrant associations are often assumed to be social phenomena already ‘out there’, while their developmental trajectories and social roots are relatively understudied. Much literature has explored their contribution to the socio-political integration of newcomers, lumping together all of their non-political activities as ‘co-ethnic sociability’. However, their micro-social roots deserve more attention, and the identity and symbolic dimensions o…
Searching for Well-being in Care Work Migration
This article revisits the migration–care nexus through the lens of subjective well-being, building on a case study of immigrant women employed as live-in care workers in Italy. Based on their constructions, practices and displacements of well-being, care work migration is appreciated as an inherent source of paradoxes and dilemmas. While a search for “better days” does underpin migrant women's life trajectories, its accomplishments are typically …
Introduction to the Special Issue
In this introduction, we argue for the need to better understand so- cial work with migrants and to enhance its research bases against a background of increasing mobility and ethnic diversification across Europe. While much has been written on the influence of international migration on national welfare regimes and on specific forms of social welfare provision, the ways in which mi- gration affects mainstream social work practices are relatively …
Urban Multiculturalism beyond the ‘Backlash
All across European receiving societies, the mainstream political discourse is displaying increasing disaffection with multiculturalism. It is primarily at the level of local policies, though, that the social inclusion of immigrants and the governance of ethno-cultural diversity are negotiated. Building on a comparative study of the urban ‘adaptations’ of multiculturalism in eight European cities, this article addresses three questions: (1) the c…
Immigrants and home in the making
The search for home as a material and symbolic space is an increasingly salient social question across contemporary multiethnic cities. The boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic are increasingly contested and yet remain a crucial issue, especially for minority groups such as immigrant and ethnic communities. The domestication of everyday living spaces carried out by immigrant and ethnic groups entails a variety of ways of 'cult…
Mapping the Theoretical Foundations of the Social Work-Migration Nexus
This article revisits the social work–migration nexus by investigating the implications of the debate on mobility and transnationalism. The conceptual boundary between migration as single-directed movement and as an extended and multidirected process has been much discussed across the social sciences but not yet fully in social work. However, the dialectic of sedentarism versus mobility makes for a key challenge to the arrangements and the tacit …
Burden, blessing or both? On the mixed role of transnational ties in migrant informal social support
This article revisits migrants' informal social support by exploring their exchanges of material and immaterial resources with the family members left behind. The latter are typically constructed as net beneficiaries of migrants' struggles for a livelihood abroad, and even as a potential constraint on their self-realization. Building on a qualitative study of Ecuadorian domestic workers in Italy, the author explores - instead - whether left-behin…
Sociology (64 obras) · Political science (53 obras) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (51 obras) · Law (37 obras) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (34 obras) · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy (30 obras) · Social science (30 obras) · Politics (26 obras) · Gender Studies (25 obras) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (25 obras)