The intra-EU mobility of migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean Sea is increasingly governed through systematic rejections at the borders within the Schengen area. Border enforcement within the EU, specifically at the French/Italian and the Austrian/Italian borders, entails unexpected social and political consequences: shifting sovereignties of neighbouring countries, rising economies of human smuggling, escalating numbers of deaths at the borders, social mobilisations, criminalisation of solidarity and evolution of migrants’ strategies. By comparatively focusing on two significant areas of transit/buffering, the proposed project intends to uncover and understand side-effects of border enforcement by collecting empirical data on the field.
Cecilia Vergnano is a Social Anthropologist from the University of Barcelona, with a PhD dissertation on forced (im)mobilities of Roma migrants in Europe. She is currently a Marie Slodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Sciences Research (AISSR) of the University of Amsterdam, with a research project about the social and political impacts of the reintroduction of border controls within the Schengen area and the policing of asylum seekers autonomous mobility through pushbacks at internal EU borders. Her research interests are borderization processes, forced (im)mobilities, racialization processes, border-crossing facilitation practices, territorial stigmatization, forced evictions.
Alpine border conflicts 