Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to understand aspects of contemporary Europe from the perspective of both the migrants (who are strangers for Europeans) and those they themselves perceive as òther (the Europeans). The migrant is constructed as stranger by not only the receiving state, through its policies and laws, but more experientially, by the others who are encountered in daily life in an alien world. At the same time, the migrants construct their European 'other' as a separate category from themselves so that the experience of being a migrant is always located in this fraught and complex relationship between migrants and others. The paper is based on material collected through interviews and fieldwork in the Emilia Romagna and Lombardy regions of northern Italy. My focus in not only on Indian immigrants, men, women and young people, but also on Italian people who engage with them in different roles through a variety of services, activities and supportive endeavours. Through this paper, I seek to explore and develop the categories of migrant and his or her others showing that the social place of the stranger/newcomer cannot be treated as an exclusive, homogeneous, separate category and is constituted only in specific contexts in and through relationship with Europeans and other non-European 'others'.