Paper/Proposal Title
Cultivating Sustainability: Migrant Justice, Food Sovereignty, and Farmworker Solidarity Movements in Southern Italy
Location
Kennedy Union 222 (on UD's main campus)
Start Date
November 2023
End Date
November 2023
Keywords
migration, racial capitalism, environment, Africa, Italy
Abstract
In this presentation, I posit agricultural labor in Italy as a site for understanding the intersections of migrant, racial, and climate justice issues, and for generating practices of sustainability. Migrants comprise at least 30% of Italy’s agricultural workforce yet often labor in inhumane and invisibilized conditions shaped by racialized exploitation and legal precarity. At the same time, farming itself is changing in response to climate change. These issues are especially stark for African migrants, who make up an increasingly significant part of this workforce. In a time of environmental change and growing solidarity movements, what place do migrant farmworkers occupy in legal and cultural movements to challenge the forms of real and imagined crime associated with their labor? How do their efforts speak to broader issues that African migrants in Europe confront?
This presentation draws on ethnographic research in Sicily and takes inspiration from small farms and cooperatives that are joining forces to challenge what they see, and what I posit in the presentation, as interconnected realities: criminal organizations battling for territorial control; a gangmaster system that maintains inhumane worker conditions; migrants of various legal status on whose labor the agricultural industry depends; climate change; and solidarity movements that respond to the exploitation of lands and workers and generate new practices of sustainability. Engaging the lenses of critical refugee studies, racial capitalism, and transnational Italy, I discuss how these solidarity efforts confront interconnected, multifaceted struggles and envision alternative futures.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
Eleanor Paynter studies displacement, asylum, and migrant testimony, focusing on Africa-Europe mobilities and the Black Mediterranean, and engaging narrative and ethnographic methods. Her book-in-progress, Emergency in Transit, draws on oral, written, filmic, and visual witnessing forms to discuss the complex dynamics shaping Italy’s recent immigration "emergencies." She holds a PhD in Comparative Studies from the Ohio State University, recently served as Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, and is currently Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Italian Studies and at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University.
Cultivating Sustainability: Migrant Justice, Food Sovereignty, and Farmworker Solidarity Movements in Southern Italy
Kennedy Union 222 (on UD's main campus)
In this presentation, I posit agricultural labor in Italy as a site for understanding the intersections of migrant, racial, and climate justice issues, and for generating practices of sustainability. Migrants comprise at least 30% of Italy’s agricultural workforce yet often labor in inhumane and invisibilized conditions shaped by racialized exploitation and legal precarity. At the same time, farming itself is changing in response to climate change. These issues are especially stark for African migrants, who make up an increasingly significant part of this workforce. In a time of environmental change and growing solidarity movements, what place do migrant farmworkers occupy in legal and cultural movements to challenge the forms of real and imagined crime associated with their labor? How do their efforts speak to broader issues that African migrants in Europe confront?
This presentation draws on ethnographic research in Sicily and takes inspiration from small farms and cooperatives that are joining forces to challenge what they see, and what I posit in the presentation, as interconnected realities: criminal organizations battling for territorial control; a gangmaster system that maintains inhumane worker conditions; migrants of various legal status on whose labor the agricultural industry depends; climate change; and solidarity movements that respond to the exploitation of lands and workers and generate new practices of sustainability. Engaging the lenses of critical refugee studies, racial capitalism, and transnational Italy, I discuss how these solidarity efforts confront interconnected, multifaceted struggles and envision alternative futures.
