My scientific work built upon the intensive ethnographic fieldwork and analysis that I have carried out in Lampedusa and other European borderlands during the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship period.
During the development of the first part of the HeBo project, and in relation to the organizational and political challenges constituted by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to focus on Lampedusa, together with some field trips to other sites on European borders (in particular, the areas of Calais, in France, and the French-Italian border on the Alps). Due to its geographical location and the current geopolitical framework, Lampedusa is one of the major gateways to Europe for undocumented migrants crossing the Mediterranean. This configuration makes this island a site where the differences and inequalities between different forms of mobility and body management are at the same time explicit and specifically entangled. Moving forward from these premises and focusing on ‘illegal’ migrants, the hypotheses on which I could base my work were therefore twofold: an analysis of healthcare provision as a tool of the government of migrations, drawing on, and in spite of, the universal right to health; a questioning of the ways in which the border is embodied, and of the corresponding politics of life.
In this general theoretical and empirical framework, the implementation of the HeBo research program allowed me to develop a reflection on the possibility of a clinical gaze on the borders translating into a political and moral exploration of their contemporary forms, especially in Europe and the Mediterranean.
One of the greatest challenges HeBo posed was its reconfiguration in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amongst the many transformations it caused, COVID-19 pandemic reconfigured several paradigms, policies, and practices in the management of European borders. HeBo’s research themes are at the core of such fundamental changes. However, these difficulties became research objects and objectives themselves, leading me both to reorganize effectively the research plan and to reconfigure the scientific questions underlying the project, with entirely positive analytical outcomes. Such changes included for example: 1) The dynamics either created or unveiled by the pandemic in terms of medical relationships, political management of a public health crisis, and biosecurity concerns at the borders; 2) Relationships shaped by new medical concerns and risks of contagion, especially in politically-sensible space as borders are; 3) New forms of medical interactions and changes in the practices of medical inspection at the border; 4) New racialized conceptions of migrants as possible threats for the health of a community and a territory; 5) New policies blurring the political limit between migration management and public health management. In this framework, the island of Lampedusa emerged as the privileged context where to ethnographically observe such dynamics with the highest effectiveness.
Despite the obstacles and delays imposed by the pandemic, HeBo’s dissemination program included a book project (to be published in 2024 and tentatively titled Odysseus’ Scars. Borders and Bodies in the Mediterranean), three peer-reviewed articles, a chapter for a collective volume, and other dissemination actions.
Publications stemming from HeBo also included several non-academic articles published in some of the most known online cultural and political magazines, with the aim of valorization for non-academic audiences. Other non-academic publications will follow soon, in addition to intersectoral symposia and, when the book will be published, public meetings. Finally, through the network and the relationship built around my research work, and through its reputation, I had the opportunity to present the developments of HeBo in several public occasions through the two-years fellowship (in Paris, Bern, Dublin, Catania, Rome, and elsewhere).
