Fiona McKinnon

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Throughout history, migration has fueled human progress, sparking innovation, spreading ideas and technology, relieving poverty, and laying the foundations for a global economy. But human mobility has also produced tensions, hardship and conflict. This course will examine the academic field of migration studies, focusing on the modern history of migration in Italy and particularly the " Mezzogiorno, " which has once again come to be considered an advantageous destination, for permanent relocation or for transit. Taking the long view, migration is nothing new in Sicily. Due to its favorable location in the Mediterranean Sea, this island has always been a crossroads; civilizations have come and gone here for millennia. And it is at the center of it all again, as migration has become an increasingly contested topic. In a world more interconnected than ever before, increasing numbers of people have the means and motivation to migrate. A percentage of these are refugees—numbering in the millions—and the " crisis " caused by the irregular arrival of forced migrants in Europe has stimulated debates about nationalism and citizenship, regulation and enforcement, multiculturalism and integration, with moral implications and policy conundrums that concern societies the world over. Situated on the ramparts of Fortress Europe and at ground zero for the West's migrant reception crisis, Siracusa is exceptionally well-placed for the study of migration. The southeast corner of Sicily receives and processes a significant percentage of Italy's new migrant boat arrivals, and it now hosts the European Regional Task Force (EURTF), where the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (formerly Frontex) works with other EU agencies to enhance coordination of member states' efforts to maintain surveillance and control over Europe's external borders. This is where humanitarian endeavors confront organized crime and contend with efforts to ensure security. At this critical international threshold and geopolitical juncture, this course offers a multidisciplinary overview of the study of international migration, combining theoretical insights from academic scholarship with the analysis of immigration policy drawn from fieldwork and personal interactions as well as contemporary case studies. In a variety of contexts, students will work and socialize with recent immigrants to Sicily, as well as established foreign-born members of the community. This approach is designed to provide students with a variety of perspectives, and with the opportunity to consider and discuss these timely issues and to critically analyze current theoretical and policy debates around immigration in the Mediterranean and beyond.

Purgatory. That’s the idea that pervades After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives, a collection of academic essays analyzing what happens to failed asylum seekers and other migrants after they are forcibly or “voluntarily” returned to their countries of origin. These people are in limbo, awaiting return to a state of grace—at home, back in the host country they have been expelled from, or maybe somewhere else—and they are suffering a great deal for their mistakes, whether criminal or administrative, in the meantime.