Abstract

This paper begins from the present condition of migrant workers in the district of Foggia, south-eastern Italy, one of the largest agro-industrial enclaves in the country, employing tens of thousands of workers who live and labour in conditions of extreme precarity and exploitation. Techniques of containment of such labour force range from the spatial to the juridical and symbolic, through interlacing discourses and their material dimensions and outcomes, in which migrants are constructed as a security (and health) threat or a humanitarian emergency. Drawing on over nine years of engaged participant research and on archival and secondary sources, I reconsider the genealogies of such “dispositifs”, which date back to pre-unification projects of agrarian and penal reform and to the emergence of a racialist paradigm in the post-unitary Italian context, in relation to criminal anthropology. In particular, I examine their application to carceral regimes of labour in projects of land reclamation, which have shaped many agro-industrial enclaves (and especially that of Tavoliere, in the district of Foggia). The current materialities of migrant containment can thus be shown to bear the stratified, spectral traces of past projects and modes of governance.

Genealogies of containment: migrant labour, bonifica integrale and bio-carceral regimes in an Italian agro-industrial enclave

Irene Peano, Institut of Social Sciences, ICS – University of Lisbon

About the event series

“STS-MIGTEC circle” is a small format which takes place once a month and which serves to reflect jointly on work-in-progress contributions related to the themes of interest to STS MIGTEC. The idea is to create a safe space for probing and experimenting with ideas, arguments, attempts of analysis, sense-making of empirical material.