Migrants’ Everyday Life and Collective Care in the Streets of Rome

The long summer of migration in 2015 and the effects of the Dublin regime made the city of Rome register an increasing presence of migrant subjects abandoned on the streets, relying on makeshift solutions and practices for living. Beyond the dangers of a life in certain environments, these ‘ephemeral urban realities’ (Katz 2023, 1611) encounter various forms of violence on a daily basis including institutional abandonment, coercive care and harassment enforced by police authorities. Using life-stories and the photographs collected during an ethnographic work delivered in the city of Rome between 2021 and 2022, this contribution aims to shed light on the individual and collective struggles and coping strategies against these structural conditions. Migrants develop collective practices to cope with a ‘dangerous outside’ (bell hooks 1989), making the street not only a habitable ground but sometimes even a safer space. Therefore, the objectives of the contribution are: 1) to explore migrants’ everyday life between individualities and multiplicities (Tazzioli 2020); 2) to develop care as a critical epistemic lens to analyse migrants’ lives in the streets of Rome; 3) to frame the ‘political’ beyond canonical representations.

bell hooks. 1989. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36: 15–23. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203891315-22.

Katz, Irit. 2023. “Borderzone Departure Cities: Jumping-Off Urbanism of Irregular Migration on the Edges of Europe.” Antipode 55 (5): 1608–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12923.

Tazzioli, Martina. 2020. The Making of Migration. Sage Publications.