News
Migrant "crisis" in the Mediterranean? Perspectives from Italy, 5 March 2024
On 5 March 2024 the ISS21 Migration and Integration Cluster and the Department of Italian UCC hosted a seminar with guest speakers Angela Caponnetto and Prof. Nando Sigona.
The seminar was followed by a reception to launch two books:
Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London (JC Macarie)
Migration and Home: IMISCOE Short Reader (M. Fathi & C. Ní Laoire)
Biorgaphies of Speakers
Angela Caponnetto was born in Palermo and lives in Rome. She is a reporter for the Italian national broadcaster, working for the all-news television channel, Rainews24. Angela works in current affairs, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of migration across Europe, particularly via the sea. Her work includes numerous reports from military ships and NGOs involved in search and rescue missions in the central Mediterranean, and she has also documented the situation, in Niger, Senegal and Gambia, of people migrating in search of a better life. In Italy, she has conducted investigations into conditions in migrant reception centres and into mafia infiltration of the management of some centres, resulting in attacks and threats against her and her crew: verdicts against those responsible for these attacks were recently confirmed by the Court of Appeal. In the spring of 2022, she reported on the exodus of Ukrainian refugees into Moldova as a consequence of the Russian invasion. In 2023 she documented the tragedies in the central Mediterranean from Lampedusa, at Cutro in Calabria in the eastern Mediterranean, and the shipwreck off the Peloponnese in Greece with the loss of hundreds of migrants.
In June 2020, she published the book, Attraverso i tuoi occhi: cronache dalle migrazioni (“Through your eyes: migration chronicles”; Piemme/Mondadori), fruit of her many years in the field.
Professor Nando Sigona has over twenty years of research experience in the field of migration and forced displacement. He is Chair of International Migration and Forced Displacement at the University of Birmingham, UK where he teaches sociology of migration, displacement and citizenship. He is the Director of the Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity (IRIS). Nando is also Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, visiting professorial fellow at Utrecht University and Senior Research Associate at ODI. His research interests include: irregular migration; statelessness; youth and family migration; Romani politics and anti-Gypsyism; asylum in Europe and the Mediterranean region; intra-EU mobility and the making of EU citizenship. Recent publications include The Oxford Handbook of Superdiversity (with Fran Meissner and Steven Vertovec, OUP 2022), Becoming Adult on the Move (with Elaine Chase and Dawn Chatty, Palgrave 2023), and Undocumented migration (with Roberto G. Gonzales, Martha Franco and Anna Papoutsi, Polity, 2019). He is Scientific Lead for the Horizon Europe’s I-CLAIM project (www.i-claim.eu) on irregular migrants in Europe.
He will speak on ‘Migrant deaths and the politics of mourning during the Mediterranean “refugee crisis’: In migration and refugee studies, migrant deaths have frequently been closely linked to contemporary forms of border and migration governance. Migrant deaths at sea have also played a central role in shaping policy and public responses to Europe’s “crisis.” Yet relatively little scholarly work has analyzed migrants’ personal experiences related to death and the impact of these experiences on their mobility. Drawing on 500 semi-structured interviews with people who crossed the Mediterranean Sea by boat in 2015–2016 and over 100 interviews with key stakeholders in the region, the talk will document geographies of violence and death stretching throughout migration trajectories that start far from the Mediterranean shores. It shines light on the different ways that encountering the deaths of others and perceiving the inevitability of one’s own death drive and shape migration decisions and journeys. Finally, it highlights differences between European policy responses to migrant deaths and the experiences of those migrants making the journey.