The pandemic brought migrant farm workers into the limelight once again, as has happened repeatedly in the last three decades, in Italy as in many other parts of the world. Here I examine how intersecting and sometimes conflicting discourses and interventions, that have this biopolitically conceived population as their object, decide upon these subjects’ worthiness of attention, care, and sympathy through criminalizing, victimizing, and humanitarian registers. I reflect on some of the affective dynamics that sustain both the governmental operations through which these populations were (sought to be) managed and reactions against them from a situated perspective, as an accomplice to many of the forms of struggle in which migrant farm workers have engaged in the last decade in Italy. The stage for many such occurrences is what I have elsewhere defined as the “encampment archipelago” that many such workers, and particularly those who migrate from across West Africa, inhabit—labor or asylum-seeker camps, but also slums or isolated, derelict buildings, and various hybrid, in-between spaces among which people circulate.
Articles by Irene Peano
Irene Peano (PhD Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge) is currently Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. She previously held a postdoctoral positions at the same Institute as well as at the University of Bologna (aswhere
she held a Marie Curie Fellowship), and a visiting professorship at the University of Bucharest. Her work has always focused on processes of labor migration (with particular reference to sexual and agricultural work) across Italy, Nigeria, and Eastern Europe. She explores mechanisms of control, containment, extraction, and resistance, through methods which place engagement, solidarity, and participation at the center of her research. Currently, she is working on a monograph that investigates the material, spatial, symbolic, and affective stratifications of racism and (more generally) of labor containment, and of forms of resistance against them, by reference to the development of Italian agro-capitalism since the late eighteenth century.