CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | De Figueiredo, Beatriz |
|---|---|
| Title | 'Solo la lotta paga': Building Migrant Solidarity in the Neapolitan Commons |
| Summary | Migration governance in Europe is a controversial topic. In times of growing right- wing populism, civil society initiatives try to counter the state’s strategies of migration management, often described by mechanisms of surveillance, racialization and marginalization. This thesis explores how migrant rights are pursued in the context of an urban common in Naples. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork with Movimento Migranti e Rifugiati Napoli (MMRN), a social movement that works from inside one of the eight recognized self-managed squats in the city — Ex-OPG “Je so Pazzo”. This study traces the politics and mechanisms by which solidarity is strived for, the effects it has on the urban fabric and the tensions inherent to such political projects. In the dual space-making and subject-making strategies of the urban common in question, it locates a mutual aid-based approach to “bottom-up” migration governance that highlights the intertwining of migration and capitalism. The argument outlines how MMRN centres migrants in anti-capitalist struggles, framing migrant rights through the language of labour; a labour that is produced as disposable, commodified and illegalized. The space of the commons emerges, then, as a site for contesting the uneven distribution of inequality under neoliberal capitalism and for constructing new political subjectivities enabled by horizontal, continual enactments of mutualism. The objective of solidarity is, however, undercut by unaddressed internal power hierarchies and ambiguous external relations the movement struggles to work through. This thesis contributes to discussions of the intersection of migration and urban studies by providing an ethnographic account of a (somewhat) successful migrant solidarity movement. By juxtaposing discussions on the construction of the commons with insights on the structuring of race and class, it seeks to imagine new ways of “being together” in the current political moment, in opposition to the extractive EU migration regime. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem Kumar; Sopranzetti, Claudio |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/figueiredo_beatriz.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University