refugee, agency, city

My PhD dissertation titled refugee, agency, city, is a research at the intersection of critical urban theories and migration studies. It grows out of an ethnography conducted in Milan, Italy motivated by a search for collective practices of refugees claiming urban space in the years following the 2015 so-called refugee crisis. The ethnography comprises projects shaped by the interactions between refugees and self-organized solidarity groups. These projects include housing struggles, claiming asylum seekers’ rights in refugee camps, and claiming regular jobs and social recognition. Through a multiscalar methodology, I look at (a) the spatial configuration of refugee governance in Milan, i.e. reception centers, shelters, detention and deportation center; (b) the subjects who are involved in refugee management in the place, in a scalar relation, from European Union, to the national-state, the city, and non-state actors including humanitarian third sector and multinational profit making companies; (c) the self-organized subjects of civil society such as associations, volunteers, and social movements in solidarity with migrants; and (d) the collective projects of migrants and solidarity groups as practices which struggle for solidarity and commons. By putting the critical urban theories of scale and state in dialogue with the racial capitalism, I examine the continuous reorganization of the hierarchical interrelationships among scales and its relation to the triadization of state-civil society- migrants. For this, I look at the collective struggles of migrants and solidarity groups in relation to the challenges of (a) self-organizing body of civil society in their relation to the state apparatus and the roles they have to assume or resist to in the new models of governance, (b) asylum seekers in how they are being positioned in social life by their legal, social, and economic precarity, and (c) the encounter of migrants and solidarity groups in finding some common ground while simultaneously situated against and within multiscalar racialized asymmetric power relations.