Interview on Frontex and the academy with Maurice Stierl for Border Criminologies

Originally appeared at: https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/blog-post/2023/04/frontex-campus-interview-professor-michele-lancione

Thanks to Maurice Stierl for the care and support.

Frontex off Campus! An Interview with Professor Michele Lancione

Michele Lancione works as a Professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Polytechnic University of Turin. In July 2021, he discovered that his university had agreed to produce maps and infographics for Frontex in order ‘to support the activities’ of the agency. Since the foundation of the border agency in 2004, these ‘activities’ have been pivotal in securitising and militarising EU borders. Many have argued – including myself – that they have also relentlessly produced the ‘migration crises’ Frontex claims to combat.

Over recent years, Frontex has faced a series of investigations into its activities, not least for the agency’s implication in serious human rights violations at the EU’s external borders. When Professor Lancione approached the university after learning of the cooperation and asked to end its contract with the agency, he was told that the project was simply producing ‘harmless data’. In this interview, we speak about his struggle to get Frontex off campus.

Author(s)

Maurice Stierl
Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) Osnabrück University

Posted

 

a poster
Abolish Frontex (https://abolishfrontex.org/take-action/resources/)

 

Maurice Stierl: How did you find out about the collaboration between your university and Frontex, and what happened when you raised your concerns?

Michele Lancione: I first learned about this collaboration in a departmental meeting in July 2021. I had joined the department only four months earlier and was surprised. There was little reaction when I raised my concerns. Very few of my colleagues became allies in the fight to stop the agreement with Frontex. Some knew little about the EU border agency. Despite all existing evidence, including on Frontex’ cooperation with the so-called Libyan coastguard to violently intercept migrant boats, they seemed detached from the issue. For others, I suspect, it was simply easier to stay calm and let things go. Most academics in Italy don’t speak out against their institutions. And a solid critique takes time and energy. Some probably told themselves, ‘our colleagues are just doing harmless maps – what is wrong with that?’

Another issue is that this is not the university’s only problematic relationship. The Polytechnic University of Turin also works with defence contractors, for example. So, it is not just about Frontex. The agreement with the border agency needs to be understood as part of a larger cartography of militarisation in which my university, and the European academic sector at large, plays a role. The agreement with Frontex has persisted despite critique as the university is scared that if they end the agreement, this might open Pandora’s box, leading to other agreements, such as those with defence contractors, to be scrutinised and challenged.

Stierl: Was there no discussion about the potential harm that could result from collaboration between researchers and border enforcers?

Lancione: No. Instead, the collaboration was presented as proof of the department’s ‘research excellence’. But what my colleagues are doing is not research. It is essentially service provision. Frontex asked for maps, my department agreed to deliver maps using data that is either open source or provided by Frontex. The problem is that maps are never neutral. Indeed data, any kind of data, is never harmless. Frontex’s maps commonly show big red arrows that point from Africa to Europe. These supposedly indicate migration flows, but they produce a sense that we are under siege by threatening migrants landing on Italian shores.

The Frontex map of 2017
The Frontex map of 2017 (from here: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Frontex-map-of-2017_fig1_337260503)

Clearly, Frontex has a vested interest in generating this feeling. It depends on the political legitimisation it receives from EU member states, which is rooted in the idea that Europe must be defended against unregulated migration flows. When a university like mine assists in creating such maps, it gives them scientific credibility and legitimacy.

Stierl: You’ve written that a campaign is emerging in response to Frontex coming ‘onto campus’. What has happened so far?

Lancione: The department was a tense place for me after I released a public statement and gave some interviews in autumn and winter of 2021. But I also received positive reactions and solidarity. Some colleagues joined me in taking a public stance against the collaboration. Students also voiced their strong opposition, and many groups fighting against Frontex across Italy and Europe got in touch. I used this moment to get in touch with European campaigners trying to abolish Frontex, and to learn more on the agency’s activities.

One of the most memorable encounters was with workers from the port of Genoa and their union. For a very long time, they have struggled against companies whose ships offload weapons in the port. At times they have even blocked ships from landing. To them, fighting against Frontex means fighting against the militarisation of our societies. This is a struggle that must unite workers across economic sectors, because the military – as a form of industry and culture – cuts across multiple domains of life.

Stierl: Were there any risks for you to engage in this sort of campaign against your employer? Is there a potential price to pay for being an ‘outspoken scholar’?

Lancione: Not really. As a full professor, I can ‘afford’ to take a stance. But I have received my fair share of negative reaction. Some colleagues are not talking to me anymore. The head of department is not responding to me. Very high-ranking members of my university have expressed the need – in private university meetings – to ‘get rid of that anarchist’. I am fine in being labelled as such. But they won’t get rid of me, or of the others fighting for a more just university, very easily.

Stierl: On your blog, you wondered: “Can I carry [out] ‘ethical’ research work, if my Institution is doing affairs with a third party who is involved in the systematic violation of human rights?” Have you found an answer to this difficult question?

Lancione: Unfortunately, and I said this to my students recently, being an academic nowadays means being an institutionalised being. One has to, evoking AbdouMaliq Simone, work within and beyond the capture of the institution. For me it’s important to show our students that we are not just here accepting everything. That we don’t just talk about critical thinking in our seminars, but that we take active stances out there in the world and within our institutions. It is too easy to claim to be an activist ‘out there’, but to fail to look at the structures that you work within.

Working within an institution such as a university – any university, not just mine – is clearly a compromise. But it allows us to use the privileges that come with the job for political purposes. Doing so doesn’t constitute a deviation of what the academy should be – it is the essence of being a public intellectual. The work must start within. The classroom is a fantastic place to fight for the betterment of our world. To use one’s voice to imagine and create more just futures.

Stierl: What are the next steps?

Lancione: There are no major next steps in the campaign at the moment, because I think the agreement is sealed. It will be very hard to get the university to vote against it, since they already voted twice to maintain it. Personally, I am shifting this campaign into my own teaching. I hope to engage with students about the role of universities in militarisation. I also have a book coming out in July that is specifically addressed to students. Hopefully it will be seen as a guide on how to deconstruct universities’ problematic relationships. I hope it inspires them to start organising once more, with renewed energy an awareness.

How to cite this blog post (Harvard style):

M. Stierl. (2023) Frontex off Campus! An Interview with Professor Michele Lancione. Available at:https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/blog-post/2023/04/frontex-campus-interview-professor-michele-lancione. Accessed on: 28/04/2023

Interview on radical housing and urbanity with WOZ (Swiss-German critical left newspaper)

I am grateful to the WOZ (DieWochenzeitung) and to Raphael Albisser for giving me space on their pages to express some ideas on urbanity, radical housing struggles and the meaning of academic work.

You can find the interview, in German, here: https://www.woz.ch/-c857

Below I am providing an un-edited automatic English translation of the piece.

Credit for the photo of the actual copy of the magazine above: David Kaufmann

 

AUTOMATIC ENGLISH TRANSLATION

 

“When it comes to housing, it quickly becomes existential”.

When people in the world’s urban centres resist displacement, they are fighting for much more than a roof over their heads. Understanding the radical quality of their resistance also requires radical research, says Turin geography professor Michele Lancione.

“I’m interested in cities where struggles for housing coincide with other problems,” says Michele Lancione: a woman dyes laundry in the polluted Makoko lagoon in Lagos, Nigeria.
Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba, AFP

WOZ: Mr Lancione, where is the future of a city decided?
Michele Lancione: That’s not an easy question. And the first answer that comes to mind is: probably in a bank here in Switzerland.

Seriously?
No, of course that’s far too simplistic. I am not a Swiss expert at all. But the country is one of the most important locations worldwide in terms of financialisation, i.e. the transfer of capital into financial products, which in turn plays a central role in the development of cities and what we think of as urbanity.

How exactly?
Urban development and thus the further development of infrastructure just like housing do not only need capital. They are also designed for capital. They are designed to make even more money out of financial investments. The city is the place where this takes on a particularly concrete form, in infrastructure projects and a real estate economy that promises profits through mortgages and rents.

At the same time, the future of the city is also being decided from below, for example through processes of internal and transnational migration, which have brought about huge changes in the last forty years, especially for cities in the so-called Global South. Today, climate change also plays an important role, let’s think of the Indonesian capital Jakarta for example: parts of the city are subsiding by about 25 centimetres per year, flooding is increasing. This causes problems that are not decided in the context of financialisation – but in the experienced reality of the people who are forced to relocate. So the city is shaped as much by global economic interests as by the reality of the urban, the experienced struggle for housing. And there is a third level in between.

Politics?
Certainly, but I mean mainly a cultural understanding of a global political class that cities should look a certain way and function in a certain way. These three levels together result in the direction in which cities develop.

In your research, you have long been dealing with urban struggles over housing, with forced evictions and resistance to them. You describe this with the term “radical housing”. Where does it come from?
I don’t know exactly, to be honest. You can find it in pamphlets from housing movements in the UK in the seventies. As I understand it, and as my colleagues understand it, the radicalism that we use it to describe occurs particularly when movements are fighting the larger and broader issues that underlie housing in the first place. This can refer to economic mechanisms and profiteering, but also to completely different aspects.

Which ones, for example?
Sometimes it’s about climate justice, sometimes it’s about fighting racism or patriarchy. Most of my research so far has been done in Romania, especially in Bucharest. There I studied how people – especially Roma – fight for their right to housing. People, for example, who are evicted from their flats in the city centre. My focus was always on the struggle for the right to housing, but I found that it was about much more: it was a struggle of marginalised communities against racist dispossession. My new research project is now about examining in a number of cities around the world the social struggles with which the one over housing is interwoven.

The project started in September and is funded by the EU until 2025. What is the research goal?
We are trying to understand what people and communities are essentially trying to achieve when they struggle for a place to live in their city – sometimes without expressing it in language that is immediately accessible to us. We are investigating this in a number of cities in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. As a global research project, however, we try to avoid an overarching theory.

Why?
That would be problematic. We are dealing with geographically and also historically very specific contexts with different forms of political expression, which are not immediately understood in our very westernised academic world. It is therefore crucial that the researchers in this project are familiar with the relevant contexts and the forms of structural violence that operate there. The kind of knowledge that should come out of this project should not be: We have here overarching knowledge that can be derived from the housing struggles from Lagos to Mexico City. No, we want to provide a set of specifically locatable insights to enrich our collective knowledge of what the global struggle for housing actually is.

So you’re not creating a synthesised theory, but rather a kind of mosaic?
Yes, and I can explain why. Essentially, we want to create a decolonised scientific framework. Because the way the political in the struggle for housing has mostly been described so far stems from a Eurocentric tradition. It is perfectly fine to understand squatting in Italy as an essential practice of housing politics; but when people squat houses in Johannesburg, it probably takes a different form of expression than in Turin. One that has been hijacked in the past by certain narratives: humanitarian narratives, for example, that are about the resilience and adaptability of urban dwellers – and not about political practices. This is problematic because these narratives and this language come from the colonial centres. But sometimes the political is not just about organising or mobilising, but about multiple, nuanced forms of resistance that cannot be generalised – hence the mosaic approach.

Was it difficult to get public research funding with this approach?
I’ll be honest here: To a certain extent, you just have to play the game. The European Research Council (ERC), which is now funding my project, has a very neoliberal language. Then you have to say something like: this is a new paradigm of science, it’s groundbreaking. To get research funding, you also need a certain track record. It’s about how much and where you’ve already published – an exclusionary way of defining scientific excellence. But that’s how it works, and for better or worse, I fit into their scheme. At least the upside is that the ERC isn’t constantly breathing down your neck when funding is spoken for.

So as a professor you are a kind of door opener?
If you successfully apply for the research funds, you can hire the researchers yourself. When I got the grant, I was still at the University of Sheffield, but then had to return to Turin for family reasons. At the Polytechnic, I practically started the project all over again. And I found out: The research environment there is far less diverse than that in the UK. All around me were Italians, all white. One of the central prerequisites of the project is that people work in it who already know the respective contexts very well. So I hired people from Nigeria and Brazil. And it was a nightmare.

Why?
I spent a lot of time on bureaucracy. The system is simply not ready to hire international researchers. Mistakes were made with all the visas. It was a painful process to build this team of people with seven nationalities. Yet it was the only way to do this kind of work: I don’t want to send someone to Mumbai who was doing research on the real estate market in Rome yesterday. Because that would simply be reproducing what the vast majority of social sciences have always done.

How did you choose the cities?
I am interested in cities where struggles for housing obviously coincide with other problems. In Lagos, for example, there are two levels: First, financialisation is clearly a displacement driver; Lagos is the fastest growing city in Africa in terms of population and economy. Secondly, environmental and climatic factors play a role. Because most of the displacement is in the waterfront areas of the city.

You say that you are concerned with intersectionality, that is, with intersections of social struggles. Does housing have a prominent role in this?
I think so. After all, it is a place where we find our existential security as human beings. For me, whose interest is in cities and how people inhabit the world, housing is where an incredible number of things come together: Sexism, queerphobia, racism. Issues of how housing is granted or taken away from people. Economic issues. And it’s pretty obvious by now that the struggle for housing has become a global struggle.

Why now of all times?
Maybe it’s a bit oversimplified, but I think there are two reasons: first, the stark demographic reality. The world population has grown exponentially over the last fifty years. This inevitably brings with it questions about housing and infrastructure. Secondly, it is about the space in which capital has decided to multiply.

Where else? The lemon has been squeezed in many respects.
Exactly. And in actually every city – from Zurich to London and Belo Horizonte to Hong Kong – the primary need for housing has become the decisive growth factor. What this can mean was seen in Spain, for example, when the real estate bubble burst in 2008.

At the same time, it makes the functioning of capitalism very directly tangible for people from the most diverse backgrounds. It is all the more interesting that local and national authorities as well as international organisations and the UN are still dealing with this as if it were a simple local political issue. As if the problems could be solved with technical solutions. I have not investigated this further, but I suspect that this is being done deliberately. Because it is only by negotiating the right to decent housing in this way that capital can continue to do whatever – please excuse the language – shit it wants in urban centres.

Where does your passion for urbanity actually come from?
I grew up in the country, in a village eighty kilometres north of Turin. When I was eighteen, I moved to the city, a fairly small city, but a city nonetheless. In Turin, I started to get interested in questions around the urban. And of course I was also influenced by what I saw during my studies; there was an incredible amount written about urbanity back then.

Is it common to work with the concept of radicality in the academic world?
My colleagues and I use it to refer to militant communities that worked with the term “radical housing” because it was politically obvious. When it comes to housing, it quickly becomes existential and radical action becomes necessary. In science, my main concern is that knowledge must also be radical.

How is that to be understood?
It’s about the question of how you produce knowledge. About the decisions you make in the scientific context. It may sound silly that I have spent a year of my academic life hiring researchers who come from the context of their research. But it is a conceptual radicalism that is central in my eyes. It could make it possible to create a different kind of knowledge.

Or another example: six years ago we founded the “Radical Housing Journal”, in which we publish articles according to all scientific standards, but without letting ourselves be taken over by one of the big publishing houses. They take publicly funded academic work, privatise it and sell it back to the universities. Others even pay academics to publish with them.

They now call themselves “activist academics”. I guess that’s easier once you have a full professorship. Did you have to become more conformist on the way there?
If you publish well in the Anglo-Saxon system, you can have a fast career. I got my doctorate in 2012, and my first open ended contract as Associate Professor just four years later. And the reason was that I knew how to play the neoliberal game in the academic business. I am not ashamed to say that. Me and my partner, who is a filmmaker, were also very mobile; we lived in ten cities in three countries on two continents in less than eight years.

Where did you become an activist?
I was not yet a professor at the time, I was doing research in Bucharest as part of a post-doctoral position. I already knew the city very well and started to get involved with the Roma communities there – and that’s when the political caught up with me. I got to know feminist, anarchist, queer activist collectives – all personal matters close to my heart. And I had to learn to navigate the tensions between research and activism.

How does that work?
First, you have to be careful. It may be hip right now to call yourself an activist:n researcher: but there is a certain self-interest in the relationship. That’s why you should separate these two worlds quite strongly, because traditionally academics have always been very extractive towards activists, using them for their own purposes.

There is the same problem in journalism. What is your solution?
You must always be vigilant about your role – otherwise you risk exploiting activists for academic gain. Therefore, when I enter activist spaces, I either do it as an individual, as an activist; or I do it as an academic and in return I try to let resources flow from the academic enterprise into the activist struggles. When I call myself an activist researcher, it also refers, above all, to a critical attitude towards my own institutions. Today, as a professor, I have the opportunity to do this.

This was demonstrated last year when you publicly opposed the fact that the Polytechnic of the University of Turin, where you are employed, cooperates with the European border protection agency Frontex. What happened there?
The Polytechnic won a public tender from Frontex and now my department, where many cartographers and geographers work, is supposed to produce maps for the agency. I heard about it at a departmental meeting, and since then I have tried to fight it.

Did you succeed?
No, nothing could be done about the cooperation with Frontex. The department’s solution was to put a note in the contract stating that both parties are obliged to respect human rights. Which is of course complete rubbish, sorry. How can you ask Frontex to respect human rights? That’s madness. But at least there was some movement within the department, some colleagues took my side. And by writing an open letter to the public, it was at least noticed that not everyone in the scientific community agreed. It was encouraging for some activists, as well as for students who are grappling with the issue.

And how did the colleagues react?
The matter has caused quite a stir in the media, and for many people I am a stain on their reputations because of it. That also shows that the academic world today is largely depoliticised. A world in which young people study to pick up a degree and then have good job prospects – a functional thing for neoliberalism.

But many in the academic profession hardly have the privilege to expose themselves without consequences because many work under precarious employment conditions.
Yes, that is true. The professorship allows me to fight back. I feel it is a responsibility. But I am not the only professor at the Polytechnic. Just one of the few who speak out critically. And unfortunately that’s not only the case in Turin or Italy, many professors today are technocrats.

But there are always those who speak out clearly on political issues …
It is one thing to take a public stand, for example to co-sign an open letter, to get involved in debates. And that is also good! But it’s something else again to speak out against the academic establishment. Even if you have a full professorship, it’s not easy, because it can isolate you. I myself am on the safe side at the moment, I have my research project and my team. But what about 2025, when that ends? I wouldn’t suffer, but it would be difficult to work in an environment where I am spurned.

So should students in particular politicise the universities again?
That would probably be most effective. After all, we academics are mostly quite self-centred, we want to be liked. So if students build up pressure and start challenging their professors, they might hit a nerve. But I know from my own experience that you can’t expect that from students easily: I come from a working-class family, my father was a factory worker at Fiat, my mother a cleaner. When I arrived at the university, I first reverently accepted all hierarchies there. It is important for students to gain dominion over their own thinking and base the political on it.

Michele Lancione (38) is a professor at the Turin Polytechnic. He teaches at the Department of Economic and Political Geography of the Department of Territorial Studies and Planning. He is also Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Sheffield.

In his current EU-funded research project, Inhabiting Radical Housing, Lancione and a team of international scholars are investigating radical struggles over housing in a number of cities around the world. Lancione is co-founder and editor of the academic Radical Housing Journal and a member of the grassroots movement Common Front for Housing Rights in the Romanian capital Bucharest.

Interview-Podcast for the Relational Poverty Network

 

The Relational Poverty Network is a USA-based but internationally driven ensemble, which convenes a community of scholars to develop conceptual frameworks, research methodologies, and pedagogies for the study of relational poverty. It is a project inspired and managed by Vicky Lawson and Sarah Elwood, two scholars who have done much to help us rethinking poverty and care.

I’ve joined the RPN a few years back and they always have been incredibly generous to me, firstly promoting my documentary film and now inviting me to their fantastic series of podcast on ‘New Poverty Politics‘. The series includes some of the most exciting researchers, activists and practitioners working around poverty politics in the USA and beyond.

In ‘On Collaborative Art Praxis to Challenge Homelessness‘, Rhoda Rosen (School of the Art Institute in Chicago), Billy McGuinness (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago) and myself have a conversation on challenging communities to engage homelessness through collaborative art praxis. You can read the transcript below and access the podcast here.

 

New Poverty Politics for Changing Times:
What Emerging Nationalist Populisms Mean for Poverty and Inequality
A project of the Relational Poverty Network

A conversation between Michele Lancione (University of Sheffield), Rhoda Rosen (School of the Art Institute in Chicago) and Billy McGuinness (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago)

 

Rhoda Rosen: Hi, I’m Rhoda Rosen.

Billy McGuinness: And I’m Billy McGuinness.

Rhoda: And together we’re co-founders and co-directors of an organization, or we should say an artist collaborative, called Red Line Service. Red Line Service is the name of a train line in Chicago where many people find themselves sleeping overnight in this provisional space for want of appropriate, affordable housing in the City. On one hand, we chose the name because our first artistic interventions as an artist/curator team were with people with a lived experience of homelessness on the train platforms of this train line. But, we also wanted to complicate the term “service”, which implies a yucky hierarchical relationship of people with means and people “in-need” rather than a mutual recognition of humanity, which is what our art project aims to create and model. [as well as an artist collaborative???….]

Michele: So my name is Michele Lancione. I am essentially an urban ethnographer. I do most of my research in relation to homelessness and in relation also to evictions. Recently I have been working around evictions affecting Roma people in Bucharest, Romania.

So probably we can start with the first question and I can ask you, Rhoda and Billy, to tell me something about: what are priority research topics on impoverishment in this moment, accordingly to you and your experience?

Billy: Well it’s a conversation we’ve been having over several years, I think. While Rhoda and I might each describe it differently, for us, we understand research to be a mode of action in the world: a way of relating to people, a way of working with people. And we also understand the work that we do to be a research practice, first and foremost. But it’s a research that is founded on direct interaction with the situation that we’re trying to learn something about, as opposed to pure observation.

Rhoda: Or as opposed to coming in with knowledge, we really see ourselves as in an unfinished, incomplete, and ongoing process of learning. And that for us is really important because every event or interaction we have, or community we engage with and build, and participate in co-building, we learn more and more. So our research is really active and always in process. And for us that’s how art is. So it’s something we can bring because we’re navigating through spaces all the time; we feel that the not-for-profit spaces, or pure academic spaces, can’t really bring that piece to the table.

Michele: This is very beautiful what you are saying. It’s actually – although I’m not an artist, I wouldn’t describe myself as such – it’s actually very close to the kind of understanding that I have of academic research and engagement. And I would say, at large, it’s my definition of being an intellectual. So you do things because you are part of those things and you change in the process of doing them. And in the process of doing research with vulnerable communities, in a sense, you are not trying to – or at least I’m not trying to describe them or to rise above them, but also always trying to do something that is empowering for both. So I think it’s very close to what you are saying. And I do agree that academic spaces, conventional academic spaces, are not ready, are not perfect; and they don’t really allow for that kind of encounter. So I think that creative methodologies and community-based activities are better in that regard. They allow for a better encounter to take place with people. Yeah.

Billy: Well it’s really refreshing that you understand us as well as you do, and that you share some of our values and approaches. Because, while I think there are people who are sympathetic and supportive of our way of working, and the people that know our project well are very enthusiastic, sometimes we feel like we’re all alone in this thing [laughs]. In prioritizing direct interaction with other human beings, sometimes people look askance at us and our approaches as being somewhat unconventional!

Rhoda: Mhm. And, you know, when you’re doing it as an art project, the frame is around something that’s happening in real life, right? The frame is really around an experience and that has been a challenge to communicate to, particularly, not-for-profit direct service organizations who are at the coalface, right? They are right there giving the person the shelter when they need it, or giving them the meal when they need it. But, they almost entrench a power hierarchy, rather than coming to the person on the level of equality and the desire to be open and to change yourself, as you said, which is critical to us. And, also they come, I think, with this understanding that the thing they are helping, homelessness, is more of a trait than an experience – a momentary, current experience. And so we really try to break open everyone’s possibilities – ours and the people experiencing homelessness. We try to help ourselves and others to reimagine our personal possibilities. And so, in that sense, it’s really a kind of re-centering of the voices of poverty

Michele: Well I think I’m going to quote what you just said. Yeah, “re-centering the voices of poverty,” it’s a beautiful way of putting it. And actually, what you said, both of you, it reminds me of the parallels that there are between, let’s take your example, not-for-profit organizations and their way of dealing with homeless people, or other vulnerable communities, and what the university does to us. Because, in a sense, these are both institutions. So they have, you know, clear mandates and, as you said, they are hierarchical. And they don’t allow, you know, for a true encounter with their constituencies, somehow. And I think that, yes, experimentation with creative writing or filmmaking can allow to disrupt some of these spaces and can allow to create new spaces in the in-between, no?

And this is what I tried to do. And I sense that it’s the same thing that you try to do. And it’s always a challenge, as you said. Because when you have your colleagues, your academic colleagues or maybe also within the artist community, looking at you as a foreigner, no? As a foreign element within their space. So there is a double challenge: there is the challenge of having to deal with an institution that is not designed to give you that space, and then also to deal with colleagues that do not recognize that what you are trying to do is still part of the intellectual labor that we are supposed to do as artists, intellectuals, and academics.

Billy: Yeah I love what you said and I think that the flipside of that liability, the liability of being a part of the system which we’re trying to change, is that when we do go into a community, or have an interaction with a population of people, our approach is so different than the institutions they’ve been working with. Precisely because we are a foreign agent in this otherwise understood order of things. We come along and we try to remove hierarchy as a first step before we’ve even walked into the room. And so, you know, I’m fresh from a conversation with a friend of ours that we’ve met through this work from a few weeks ago, who said, “when I met you and Rhoda, it was the first time since I became homeless that anyone didn’t treat me like a second class citizen. I walked in and I felt like an equal, and right away I said, ‘oh well this is different. These people are different.’ And that was what kept me coming back and wanting to have the experience with you.”

Rhoda: So I want to just say that I love what both of you are saying. And thank you so much, Michele, for bringing back the institution. I don’t disagree with the points you are making – you were speaking about it as an academic space not designed for experience. What I’ve also realized is that we have to bring our work to campus, because we also all teach, right? So we teach this kind of socially engaged art practice to students, and work with them on our projects, and with communities. And so we also have to remember that what’s happening in the outside world isn’t distinct from what’s happening on campus and to teach them engaged learning.

Additionally, we have sat in class and a student has said, “I was homeless for this many months or years or whatever.” And we’ve been to presentations in museums where a student came to us crying, saying, “thank you so much for speaking about this; my family” – in the suburbs, this was – “ we slept in the car for two years.” So remembering to know that our campuses are not ivory towers, there are people in the food pantries and in shelters who we deal with everyday on our campuses – and we have to make our classrooms also spaces where we can have those conversations .

And then, you know, to Billy’s point, I love that you brought that idea back too – that we are foreign agents within institutions: it’s not just a hierarchy that excludes a set of ideas. These experiences of poverty are within our campuses too. And when we forget that and assume a kind of privilege for all, that can be very difficult.

Billy: Yeah. I’m also just thinking of the experience, just going off of what Rhoda just said, you know, we had an event yesterday. One of the participants in our program is a PhD candidate who is getting his doctorate in Social Work, and he’s been participating in our program as a way to study and inform his research. And in yesterday’s event, he was just devastated at the end of it, in a good way. He was so moved; he was so challenged; he was so opened up by the experience – and you know he was really surprised by that, it really caught him off guard. And, of course, for us, it’s a bit like, “welcome to the party, man! We’ve been waiting for you to show up and realize what this work is actually about, and how deep it goes.” And the context of his revelation was a museum of African-American history in Chicago. And he’s African-American. And so we talked a little bit about how uncomfortable the space is, necessarily uncomfortable, when we’re having the most important conversations, the conversations that get at past trauma, whether that be on a personal level or a societal level or a global level – those things we’d rather not talk about. If we don’t create a safe space for that awkwardness, then we can’t look at those problems with any kind of honesty and we can’t effectively work to change the situation. And so for him to come, you know, at an advanced moment in his research, and just begin to learn.

Michele: This is, yeah, it’s very powerful. I think actually what we are saying, what you just said, Billy, it’s a possible answer to the second question that they posed us, which is: who should poverty researchers be collaborating with, and also how?

I mean essentially is very beautiful that we have this in common, although we we don’t know each other, is that to create the possibility of collaboration both the researcher and the community, or the people we are dealing with, needs to go outside of their comfort zones. So they really need to do what you just said, Billy, just like moving away from the comfort of what we know, and from the comfort of our established categories, and try to have a conversation from that discomfort. So, in a sense, the discomfort becomes the first step in order to be able to have the encounter that we were kind of evoking before. And I insist on this notion of the encounter, mostly because I am an ethnographer. And I think that before the “graphy” part of ethnography, which is the representation – and that representation can be done in academic form, but also in creative different ways, in artistic forms. Before that “graphy,” the “ethno” part is fundamental: which is exactly the encounter, the getting to know the other. And that encounter is possible only through that initial discomfort.

And also the discomfort, though, if you want, the conversation through Skype through different time zones, and so on and so forth. I don’t know you, I don’t know your faces, there is an initial discomfort. But still, it’s productive, it allows us to become closer. So I’m really enjoying this.

Billy: Yeah, that’s great. We feel the same way. I love that, yeah, the importance of the encounter -– and the crucial nature of the discomfort as a necessary first part of the process.

Rhoda: And maybe the end. I mean, I don’t know about the end point, but maybe the next step is, of course, the reciprocity. So when I think of old fashioned ethnography and what this person, this researcher, actually brought to us was “oh, I can’t participate, I’m here to observe.” But, in fact, that’s why it took him so long! Because as soon as he reached that discomfort and that openness, when he had the rug pulled out from under him, then the moment of an authentic relationship with people, with others – a reciprocal, rather than hierarchical, relationship with others was possible.

Michele: Yeah. I think that everything we are saying points to the next question that they are suggesting for us to tackle, which is: what are priority actions we should be taking to resist exclusionary trends? So we live in different contexts, and maybe you want to say something about a possible answer to this question in relation to your context? I mean the U.S., and Chicago, in particular?

Billy: It’s such a rich question. And of course I immediately think about – when I think about exclusionary trends, I think about equal and opposite trends moving in the other direction, right? And I’m answering really only for myself to say that I think insisting on – and I’ll use Rhoda’s language because I think she says this – “radical inclusivity” in our approach is a very direct and honest rebuttal of exclusionary trends that we’re seeing. To put inclusivity, a genuine inclusivity, at the front of the conversation. But I think to constantly challenge ourselves when we think we’re being inclusive to know that we’re not. To know that we can always open that door wider, expand that conversation further.

Michele: And for you, Rhoda, it’s the same, I guess? Or…?

Rhoda: Well, you know, Billy said that so beautifully and smoothly. It seems so simple to open a door, but it can be challenging! You know, we encounter a lot of mental illness on the streets. To back up to your point about Chicago: Chicago is a wealthy, yet bankrupt city sitting in the middle of a bankrupt state, not that this excuses closing mental institutions, rather than ending the corruption – but they have closed most of the state facilities and those people have been delivered to the streets. Our prison system, which Billy can speak more to, our Cook County Jail, is the largest mental health facility in the world.

Billy: And in fact, the three largest mental health facilities in the United States are all city jails: in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

Rhoda: Right. And so we see the impact of those – of not just gentrification, not just the redlining that took place to ensure that Black families in the 60s and 70s wouldn’t be able to buy homes and keep them. The forced gentrification – as the city moves south and west into what were historically African-American areas, and watching people having to leave those. Automation, as well – you know, all of the contemporary things we see globally are being played out in a very heightened way in Chicago. And so, we plop down in the middle of that and say, “you know what? There are solutions, whether that’s housing first or paying people a living wage, and we’re just going to enact those as our art practice.” It’s that simple. And if two of us can do it, how much more if, as Billy likes to say, plumbers start caring or nurses start caring, or art historians start caring together, how might we enact real change.

Michele: Wow, this is very informative for me, that I don’t live in that context. There is one of the examples that you just made, Rhoda, which is housing first. I’ve been working a little bit on that in Italy, in ways. And there is one thing that has always struck me about housing first, is that: it doesn’t really require a huge economic investment. It doesn’t really require a huge managerial investment. What it really requires, the fundamental requirement – I don’t know if you agree with this – is a cultural change in the way you look at homelessness, no? So instead of looking at people from the point of view that they are not ready for it, you just look at them like, of course they are ready for it, no?

But this is such a big change. And I think that one of the ways – just to link my answer to the question – one of the ways to resist excusing these trends, from my point of view, from the work I do as an academic, is just to try to push these kind of radical agendas and policies in a very provocative way. I mean, in a sense, I tell my students, “just stop doing literature reviews.” I mean, of course, you need the literature review, but “start to think about what you are studying in a critical way, and also in a radical way.” And when I say “radical” I mean something that can be made active in the world, that is actually enabled by people in a sense.

So, in a sense, I mean a very stupid way of answering this question is that exclusionary trends, in a sense, can be resisted only by constructing non-exclusionary trends. And you construct non-exclusionary trends, as being an academic, just concerning yourself with constructing ways of making theory and policy radical: action enabled by people. You know, something that can be used by communities. Yeah, and everything you said, I mean, the scale is different, the context is different, the history is different – but many of the issues that both of you highlighted are very much present in the UK as well. And I think we can tackle them. We can try to find solutions to them only if we start to think critically at the jobs that we do; just don’t take things for granted. And as academics I think we have a big challenge, again, because the institutional tells you essentially, you know, to take things for granted – because you have to comply with the metrics, and you have to write papers, and be ranked. OK, now I’m just starting to, you know, babbling about everything, but yeah.

Billy: It’s very important what you’re saying! And I think that, you know, where you have those people who march in the street and yell about keeping out foreigners, you have the very easy target, right? OK, this is the opposition; these are the people whose minds we have to change. But, in fact, the grossness of their approach makes them easy to identify. The harder to identify exclusionary trend is the one that is unspoken and that lurks inside the most progressive institution, the most progressive work environment. You’ll find that little thread of, “yes, we’re lifting the masses but only to the bottoms of our feet and no further because we like our position here.” And so whether that’s the academy, or whether that’s, you know, a not-for-profit system that lives on charity from the for-profit system, or wherever you look, you can find that. Which is not to say people aren’t well intentioned. On the contrary, they’re incredibly well intentioned.

So the same admonition that you give your students about actionable approaches in the world that are radical in their actionability, that same shift in perspective that you’re working with your students to create in the context wherein you work, is applicable at a dinner table with your spouse and your extended family, is applicable in the classroom, on the street – everywhere we go. And it can be confrontational without being aggressive or assaultive. You can simply plant a new perspective in the conversation that requires a response. Even if it’s not a spoken response at that moment – something someone can take away and chew on for a while and say, “hmm, I’ve got something to think about.”

Michele: Absolutely.

Rhoda: Mhm. And I kind of just want to name ¬– I think I want to name the thing that we’re talking about when we say that we want to be inclusionary in a radical and authentic way. And I think it’s about this issue that you raised, Michele, about people assumed to be coming with deficits rather than coming with assets, right? And if you assume that people come with assets then, number one, they’re welcome. But what you’re really talking about is that you recognize – because I think that’s a really important word, to recognize – another’s dignity, that is inherent. And if we were to put our finger – and I’m speaking for you too, Billy – that if we were to put our finger on what we believe about every person who we encounter – it’s that we’re recognizing their dignity and we’re, in turn, recognizing our own dignity.

Billy: Yeah. I would take out the word “dignity” and replace it with the word “humanity.”

Rhoda: I like that. [all laugh]. I agree.

Bill: I think that’s the approach.

Rhoda: Right. Because dignity is filled with historical baggage, right?

Bill: Yeah, it’s got some baggage we don’t want to carry.

Rhoda: But it’s recognizing the humanity of a person, and in turn, our own humanity which is often lost when thinking about meeting people on equal footing.

Bill: Right.

Michele: Yeah. I agree with what you said, replacing with humanity. And I think, in the end it requires just training ourselves to it, in a sense, no? Because, I mean, what we’re talking about is also about empathy. To be humane with somebody else, I think, it means to understand where they come from. And that understanding requires an empathy that can be fostered, can be trained. So, in a sense, being attentive to what other people have to say and how they behave can be learned. It’s not something that we are born with necessarily. And I think it can be born, and to a certain extent it can be taught. So I don’t if you agree with this, but I think maybe one the priorities for critical poverty studies, just to connect to the last question, is probably: find a way to let people feel, more than understand, that empathy is necessary and it’s a prerequisite, probably, of action.

Billy: Well I love that you said that, “I don’t know if you agree with me.” I think that if I didn’t agree that empathy could be learned, it would be very hard to do this work [laughs]. Because I’m trying to learn it myself through this work. Yeah, that’s right, I believe we can learn it. Sorry, I got lost as you mentioned the last question – I had a response that was specific to that, but I guess I’m just really hung up on this idea that we have to be able to learn empathy. We have to be able to learn how to listen to one another, how to be with one another.

Michele: I’m curious to hear your response to the last question then, Billy.

Rhoda: Can you repeat the words.

Billy: Yeah, what was it?

Michele: I said I’m just curious to hear the response that you had for the last question, Billy.

Bill: Can you say that last question again? I don’t have it in front of me.

Michele: Oh sorry, sorry. It’s what are priority keywords for critical poverty studies in this moment?

Bill: I think “shared humanity” might be a good place to start as a keyword, sort of recognizing and participating in shared humanity.

Michele: And for you, Rhoda, it’s the same?

Rhoda: Mhm, mhm.

Michele: Yeah, it’s a difficult question. I find myself a bit lost when it comes to keywords. I kind of don’t know how to deal with them. So probably I would say something that was said before, like “empathy”, “radical action.” And maybe I would add to this becoming a little bit slower. Like “to be slow.” It’s another thing that I throw into the pot, because I am trying to learn that. To just try to slow down, and in a sense, by slowing down, allowing for that empathy to emerge. And maybe for reasons, nowadays, for me to enter into that discomfort, the discomfort zone we were talking about in the beginning, to enter into that zone I need to slow down. Because I am going so fast and doing so many things, like you, I guess. So, in a sense, slowing down may be another keyword – just trying to take time to listen.

Billy: Yeah. That’s right on. And something that I guess that occurred to me earlier, when I read through the questions, was something that we picked up from one of our friends in one of our programs. He said he didn’t like to think of himself as homeless; he preferred to use the term “in transition.” And that really struck a chord with us. And we started using it as the preferred term for anyone experiencing homelessness. And people in our circle caught on and started using that term; they referred to people in housing transition, people in transition. And maybe a year later I was with this man again and I said: “by the way, that word that you use, “in transition,” is that common among people who are experiencing homelessness, or is that just your word?” And he said, “oh that’s just my word; that’s just the word that I like.” I said, “well we’ve been spreading it around” [laughs]. But I love that word to be something that we recognize going into any situation – that it is a situation in transition, whether that’s a personal situation or a societal one; it’s always in transition.

And so we approach, as you say, slowly, deliberately, with our eyes wide open, with our ears open, hopefully – with the understanding that what we’re looking at is changing right before our very eyes through contact with us and countless other factors.

Rhoda: I like this. We’ve got: slow pace, shared humanity, empathy, assets rather than deficits. I love the active research.

Billy: And flux, a sense of flux.

Rhoda: A sense of flux. Authentic encounters, authentic relationships, maybe. We also talk about sometimes, in fact we’ve named a program something around, “disrupting the narrative.” It’s another way of saying that we’re determined to break what people think of as poverty. And, yeah, the expertise – maybe another thing is “changing the expertise.” People come with so much of that that we can’t hear if we lead with our assumptions.

Michele: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more with the changing the expertise – starting with the academic expertise, and then of course going into the practicioning world. Yeah, changing the expertise, it’s fundamental. It’s actually, again, related to homelessness; it’s the key to change the way in which practitioners, or the media, day to day man on the street deals with homelessness.

Yeah I really enjoyed having this conversation. I just hope that sooner or later we will meet. When I come next to the US I will let you know, and I hope that you’ll do the same if you happen to come to the UK.

Rhoda: Great, yeah.

Billy: We will certainly be in touch about that. It would be wonderful to meet you into a person.

Michele: Yeah, the same. OK so we did it, apparently!

Bill: Wonderful! And it’s just 40 minutes since we started the call. [all laugh]

Michele: Exactly. So it means that we really liked it.

Rhoda: Right! Thank you so much, Michele.

Michele: No, thank you both, really. Thank you. Thank you very much. Have a nice day. Bye.

Rhoda and Billy: Bye.

Interview on ‘homing’ and radical research practice

I was recently interviewed by Milena Belloni for the ‘HOMING‘ project run by Paolo Boccagni. In the interview we discuss homelessness, home, and radical research practice. You can read the interview at this website or below.

Interview Michele Lancione (Trento, 25th September 2018)

Milena: What does home mean to you, to your work and to your disciplinary approach?

Michele: Home is where everything starts. We have “the homeless” because our idea of home includes the possibility of being without home: you can be at home but you can also loose that home. That is what interests me about “home”. It’s impossibility. Even if home is the place where you belong, and where you have a nice life, there is always the potential to lose that. This complexity, this conundrum, is the whole point. Home is never something that is safe, that is neat and clean. It is always something that is contested within and outside; something that is lost and re-appropriated.

Milena: While you were talking I was thinking…does the condition of homelessness exist? If we think that we are never completely at home we are also never completely without home. How would you

Michele: That is very interesting. In something I recently wrote I said that homelessness does not exist. What I try to argue is that one can also be homeless at home. Even if you live on the street you have a lot of relationships of affection and care that you consider being part of home. At the same time you can be homeless even if you have a conventional home, as the threat of losing it is always there. Your house can be appropriated by a bank, your love relationship can end. Thus, you can have belonging and safety on the street, in a camp and when you have a real house you can experience the precarity of being homeless. I find very useful a concept developed by Katherine Brickell, a British geographer. She speaks of home making and home unmaking: a continuum, a conundrum.

Milena: Could you give us some ethnographic example of homing and unhoming?

Michele: There is a lot of work on violence, domestic violence, patriarchy, which shows how you can be at home while not feeling at home. My work however is about the opposite: how can people who do not have at home feel at-home? I worked with drug users and homeless people living underground in the canal in front of the main train station in Bucharest. This story is widely known as it has been extensively portrayed by the media and academic world. The standard message you can get out of these portrayals is that these people are resilient. But when you live with them you realise that there is much more to it. People living underground have a community, are not just ‘resilient’. They make life: they do not just ‘get going’, or ‘survive’. This is a life characterised by caring relationships and by an economy – monetary and affective – to support the underground; in fact, in a way this economy is not so different from what you have above ground. Certainly it is a weird arrangement for many reasons. But it works. And when they were eventually evicted from the underground by Romanian authorities, those people were not able to replicate their life outside. Many got jailed, others dispersed. They lost the capacity to be alive, to construct their ‘weird life’… Many died. This is the result of the rejection by the institutions of the possibility of life underground. The institution – that is, the institutional accepted norm – rejected the possibility that you can function even if you are junky and you live underground. The point here is not arguing that homeless people should be maintained in the underground, but that we need a politics able to appreciate first, and embrace second, the proposition of life underground: a lively arrangement was created down there, which does not work (it stops to live) when it is captured into normative understandings of home, of belonging and of acceptability.

Milena: Is there an alternative to keeping them underground and also to the forcing them into shelters which they do not perceive as safe?

Michele: Yes, I think there is. Policies of harm reduction would be important in these contexts. Tthis means that I am not trying to stop you from using drugs, or to destroy your community, to institutionalise you. All I am doing – as the authority – it is to make sure that you are not harming others and yourself, by giving you cleaning syringes and providing you with medical assistance. Life underground is very hard, often without heating, without electricity. But we can reduce the harm of that life in there – or in other similar context – without destroying them. Their relations, their belonging, their care and their economy could be maintained through ‘soft’ interventions, which would not rob vulnerable communities of their capacity of being together. Of being close to each other… Evicting and imprisoning and controlling castrate that opportunity: it silences it.

Milena: What are the most relevant empirical and methodological challenges that you identify in researching home and migration?

Michele: Maybe not about migration so much, as it is not something that I have been looking at. In relation of home, the biggest challenge for me in the last years is how to make research in a way that is meaningful for the people you are researching. I mean it in a profound way. Not simply in terms of co-production of the research goal. But in terms of constituting a shared political ground where the research becomes just a tool amongst other to intervene on the social. This is not per se a methodological challenge but rather an ethical issue…it becomes methodological though. Because you can say from ethical point of view that you want to coproduce the research with your research participants and stuff like that, but then, how do you do it, really? Can a research be co-produced, if sometime (actually, the vast majority of times) is not research what is needed? The first concern of the person in front of you is not to answer your questions, is actually to change the clothes of her child because she needs to go to school. The challenge thereofre is to displace our own research priorities and carefully think about the encounter. For that you need to be humble and realise that for a while you may not do your research because at that point it is more important for the relationships that you are having to engage in forms of collective solidarity and help. We should allocate time in our project to do that kind of work. If that time is not there, then the project is always going to be one-way. Always ‘extractive’, no matter what. If, on the contrary, you are able to meet the other in a meaningful way – keeping in mind all structural power unbalances –  then not only you will establish a meaningful relationship but also your research priorities will change. Here the point is to be open to change. If you start with one idea you should never be able to finish with that same idea, that same project, that same proposition. Actually I think that you get stuck with an idea and you try to enforce that idea on your fieldwork then there is something wrong about your fieldwork.  If you do ethnography in the right way – the crisscrossed way, the minor way – then you will see that people will take you somewhere else. They do. They always do! It’s a big challenge because at the end of the day you also need to give something back to those who have funded the project. But with experience you know how to deal with these issues. The most important thing for me is to follow the fieldwork, not to please the founder or the institutional arrangement.

And then, of course, there is also an added element of complexity. The representation of the encounter. How do you represent this encounter is a way that is truthful to its complexity and meaningful for you and for those you have worked with? The key question is how can they appropriate and use that representation that you create thought your work with them. Here there is a slight difference between giving something back and working toward something that can be appropriated, modified, trashed, changed, used again. Giving something back is a photo voice exhibition. I am thriving for something more radical. Let’s try to find something that is open enough so that once you are not there anymore, communities can see value in it, use it, dismantle it, reassemble. I think that if you want to be a good ethnographer you should at least try to orient your work in that direction.

Milena: Can you give us some example?

Michele: My PhD research was done at Durham, UK, with a fieldwork around homelessness in Turin, Italy. The dilemma was I wanted “to give something back” to my interlocutors, but my PhD was in English. I needed something in Italian and accessible. So I came up with this idea of writing a novel, an ethnographic novel, and to make it as collaborative as possible. I was giving my writings to the homeless men I was working with. These notes and accounts where about their life, and life on the street in Turin. They were giving me feedback and time after time I constructed this book, ‘Il Numero 1’, which is actually a composite book. There is an introduction by one of my homeless friends, there is an ethnographic novel, and then there is a political essay at the end. There are also 22 illustrations in the book by Eleonora Mignoli. We published the book and then we presented it in Turin with my homeless friends and so on. The book was published by an anarchist press and it still travels, but I was never able to continue the engagement on the ground, in Turin. So in a sense it was helpful to ‘give something back’ but not successful in constructing, on in working with, a radical solidarity.

A second example, this time in Romania. I encountered this community of evicted Roma people and I started to work with them as an activist, because my research was with the drug users. Just to keep it short, there were a number of collective actions and involvements, mosty through a group of which I am now part, called the Common Front For the Right to Housing. Protests, petitions, solidarity on the street and more. Including a blog that I’ve set up, where Nicoleta, a powerful woman from the community, explained why they decided to occupy the pavements in front of their home for almost 2 years, to protest against the eviction and fight for their right to housing. During my involvement with the community I also made a lot of videos – interviews and everyday life –  and at the end we decided that there was scope to assemble this material into a documentary. 72 minutes telling a story of racialized dispossession, post-socialist housing privatization and the making of resistance. The interesting thing about this documentary is the following. It did not stop there – as an on-line thing for academics or film-makers. In the past two years we (as FCDL) are using that documentary to do workshops with communities who are facing eviction or experienced it, and we are also presenting it in a number of context where evictions are lived and felt (like squats). We did this in a number of spaces across Europe, including squats in Rome (like Metropoliz). The documentary becomes an excuse to sit together, get inspired and discuss about common struggles. It is not just a film, but an excuse to create solidarity.

Milena: So the difference between your first work and your last documentary is that the first one could not be appropriated but the second one instead is becoming a tool for political actions.

Michele: It can be used by others. The novel is a finished product. It is there. You can buy and that is it. Why the documentary is a moment in a series of things. First the blog then the documentary then with Nicoletta we are now writing a book: all things that are part of a collective process, occupied by different people at different times, but alive and kicking. For the book we just got an award by an American foundation, Antipode (eg. The Scholar-Activist Award). The “Diary of resistance” by Nicoletta will be in Romanian but we will also translate it into English, to continue to travel and create trans-national solidarities. It is a continuum of projects which are not necessarily academic but they speak to the public that you are working with. And the reason why I am able to do all this it is because I am collaborating with people who are doing what they are doing. They have their hand into life and they keep those tight in there! It is really on the same level. When I did the first cut of my movie, they destroyed it. I showed them and they said “change everything”. But that is fine, it couldn’t be otherwise. It is because of Veda, Iox, Misa, Carolina, Nico and many others that this thing is possible and research becomes just my way to get into the flux. They have theirs. What we share is the politics, the orientation.

Milena: Our project is framed around processes of home-making in relation to contemporary migrant trajectories. What do you think this approach can add to the field of migration and home studies?

Michele: I am not entirely familiar with migrant studies. But I know the work of Paolo and his papers. I think that what you are trying to do is super-important and meaningful because you are trying to add complexity to the idea of migration as a set of issues that is not completely detached from home. You are saying there is a continuity between losing your home and finding, or not finding, another home. The matter is the struggle that comes to the fore in this process. The complexity is what I like about the project. The cost is that you are not going to provide an easy answer. It is not going to provide one theory that explains everything and this is the real contribution if the project: to do not reduce things to neat structure, to a fix picture.

Milena: What kind of strategies would you suggest for studying home-making practices, considering that privacy is sensitive point? How did you deal with that gesture of censorship, which came from the mouth of those you were giving voice to in your writing? Do you think that some of our ethnography on the nexus home-migration might stir similar rejection from our research participants, either during fieldwork or at the time of results publication?

Michele: It depends on how you do the research. Of course people may say something to you in an interview after signing a consent forma and after they may be pissed off about the way you represent that thing. Here again I think that ethnography can do something that another epistemologies are not able to do. If you are serious about the encounter it means that you are leaving the window open to dialogue and that implies the possibility of disappointing people and of getting criticised, attacked and rejected. That’s all fine and healthy. When I published the novel on homeless people in Turin, there was this homeless woman that posted on my Facebook wall that she did not feel represented. I knew this was going to happen as I knew that I did not represent women enough. I told her. You are right. We just had a conversation, the problem was not gone. That woman is still not represented. But thanks to that encounter and confrontation I learned a lot about the limits and nuances of my research. And I know that she got something out of that too. The trick in here is to understand that the writing is not the final thing in your project: it is just the part of long term relationship that you are entering with the community you work with. To do ethnography means to continue having relationships with the people you are working with and those are sometime just too much to bear, but that’s the way it is. Relationships affects you and you affect them through what you do, what you write, and that has its onw life that intersect with yours, and keep on intersecting…

Milena: Do you still have relationship with all the people you worked with? In terms of personal engagement. You cannot become friends with everyone. You don’t like everyone…

Michele: I don t meant that we have to become friends with everyone, but that through a careful ethnography you are able to establish relationships that are open to dialogue, even to confrontation, even with the ones you don’t like. That is the beauty of it. It is not about surrounding yourself only with the one you like, but using the ethnography (and the engaged political orientation of which I’ve said) to funnel life, to let it emerge and pass through (through you, your writings, and collective endeavours). This, again, is not about having to come to an agreement with everyone. There is a lot of productive energy into having disagreement and conflict, as much as there is into agreeing and hugging. In my work I just try to create the conditions for these things to come through, and to stay true, in order to fight against discrimination and institutional normativity. It’s still a work in progress.

Thank you!

Publications: www.michelelancione.eu

Documentary film: www.ainceputploaia.com