Paolo Boccagni will give a presentation at the 20th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). Paolo’s presentation, in the session ‘Global Agenda: Border and Migration 2’, will be on Private memory as public concern: Revisiting proximity to death in forced migration through ethnography as care. 

See the abstract below.

Global Agenda – Border and Migration 2 

January 21, 3.30-5pm

Private memory as public concern: Revisiting proximity to death in forced migration through ethnography as care

Death upon border crossing involves moral and political obligations to the missing – bodies to be found, names to be given back, commemoration sites and events to be set up, state and border violence to struggle against. However, it also demands care about the living, including border crossers who survived and are now as far from death as their young age allows, while being trapped in the “waithood” of asylum. Based on my fieldwork with young male asylum seekers who risked losing their lives on their way to Italy, I interrogate the potential of ethnographic research as a form of care about them, and a tool to expand the moral and political field of contention around death in migration. This starts from “guesting” with refugees who are also survivors, as a requirement to make sense of their silences and, when appropriate, be witness to their recollections of past close encounters with death. This is typically a matter of personal risk or, at best, of witnessing the death of someone else. While survivors like my interlocutors have all reasons to leave their “bad thoughts” behind, the latter are haunting anyway. In fact, once properly approached, they can be turned into a source of claims-making – the more individual and private voices are connected with each other on a larger scale, by way of sociological imagination. Collecting these voices and writing them down is a way of care for personal stories that might otherwise get lost – and indirectly, for people themselves. It is also part of a potential collective effort to foreground death in migration as a transnational social question – an issue that, while calling for specific responsibilities and accountability at state level, can only be addressed through transnational forms of concern, debate, and action. This calls for expanding into the microfield of personal encounters with death, tracing the commonalities across them, and adding up to a collective configuration of suffering, risking, and oblivion (including voluntary one) that demands justice, starting from proper memory and acknowledgement. Respectful and open-ended storytelling has a potential to reassert the moral worth of stories, and lives, that fall out of the state-shaped boundaries of moral responsibility to the other, including the dying or dead one.