VII Escapes 2025 Conference
Memories and places of exile
Traces, solidarity, violation
Milan September 11-12, 2025
The Call for Panels of the 7th Escapes Conference Memories and Places of Exile. Traces, Solidarity, Violation solicits proposals from research, professional, activist, artistic and visual experiences on the following macro-themes:
- Fragmentation and erosion of asylum law: analysis and reflections related to the hollowing out and establishment of legal categories and/or humanitarian taxonomies as a deterrent against migrant persons.
- Solidarity: although in a context in which and solidarity actions toward migrants have been affected and criminalized, solidarity practices and civic/political activism have nevertheless been maintained, others have come to life by taking innovative forms, and still others have reconstructed solidarity contexts by keeping the traces of past experiences.
- Comparison, historical temporality and memory: in the face of crumbling spaces of recognition and a memory bent on collecting and bearing witness to exile, the experiences that over time have been sedimented in contexts (territorial, social, labor, union), in collective histories of diaspora, in practices that have acted in a sense of solidarity or that have played a role in archiving and mobilizing memories of exile deserve to be recovered and made part of the memory of the present.
- Reception and guardianship: analysis, reflections and research on the effects of shrinking reception systems on the people received, on caregivers/workers, and on local communities; what opposing practices are making space in the interstices and outside institutional reception.
- Practices of listening/construction of testimony: the international and national normative framework, humanitarian and bureaucratic taxonomies, and legislating through decrees have also had important consequences on the functions of the Asylum Commissions, on the timing and on the possibility of people to construct the testimony of violation. In this context, a priority is to question the habitus of listening, the timing/modes of telling the stories of violation, and the construction of new practices of listening and memory reconstruction.
- Crisis of the social and forms of aggregation: restrictive policies aimed at migration are to be placed in a neoliberal context that has disaggregated the social dimension of foundational elements of collective life-such as work, trade unions, forms of protection, health, and public education-with repercussions on migrant lives and communities at large.
- Long-lasting effects/longitudinal perspectives/generations: a complex analysis of migration attempts to capture effects and reverberations that the migration experience itself and the set-up of restrictions have on collectivities, the formation of subjectivities, and meaningful relationships including the consequences that are imprinted along generations and childhood.
- Impact on contexts of origin and transit: the constant call for agreements with third countries (in fact places of origin or transit of migrants) to dislocate, transfer control, and stem departures builds, renews, or reinforces border zones, impacts the social life and cultures of would-be migrants’ mobility.
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