Paper short abstract:

By putting into dialogue subjective experiences and social worlds, this paper analyses the psychic life of asylum policies and the long-term products of bordering practices. The paper considers mental 'disorders' as a way to explore the ambiguities of citizenship projects.

Paper long abstract:

According to mainstream narratives, the European Union has been thrown into crisis by migration, and borders are probably the most central place where this crisis is enacted. Anthropologists have largely problematized the idea of a migration crisis, emphasizing in particular the proliferation of borders, meant not only as specific locations, but also as scattered practices and discourses of 'bordering'. Indeed, mobility is governed at different levels, from macro migration policies, to national projects of citizenship, to micro acts, and consequences, of control. By 'zooming in' on the dialogue between subjective experiences, and social and political worlds, this paper analyses the psychic life of the European asylum system and the long-term products of the related citizenship categories and trajectories. Drawing on Foucault's work about the historicization of non-sense, and de Martino's analysis of psychopathological facts as ethnographic documents, the paper considers mental 'disorders' as a way to explore ordering practices. Through an ethnographic exploration of mental distress among refugees in Italy, the paper looks at embodied relations between migrants and state, investigating the work, and the ambiguities in particular, of citizenship projects. Focusing on symptoms and other objects resisting language, the aim is to put into dialogue idiosyncratic and collective experiences of margins, thus asking: What are the psychic products of bordering categories, procedures and regulations? And as historical events, what can those products tell about the marginal spaces they inhabit - and are inhabited by?