Migrations Forum

The Migrations Forum is an interdisciplinary works-in-progress series for Cornell migrations scholars, bringing together graduate students and faculty across disciplines to share ongoing research.

At this session, Eleanor Paynter will share a chapter from her current book project Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Precarious Migration Beyond Crisis, which draws on ethnographic and narrative study to map the coloniality of Europe's recent "refugee crisis" in the Italian context. 

The chapter to be shared with the Migrations Forum focuses on asylum seekers' experiences in reception centers established as part of emergency response measures. I discuss how structural responses to emergency hold recently arrived migrants in paradoxical situations in which they are encouraged to “integrate” into Italian or European society and yet are held, geographically and socially, just outside those communities. Attending to how migrants living in formal emergency centers bear witness to the structural and social obstacles that hold them in precarity, I consider the spatial, temporal, and legal dimensions of the limbo situations in which they live while awaiting status determination.