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Paper short abstract

Undocumented migrants in Italy may donate organs yet are largely excluded from liver transplantation. Based on multi-sited ethnography, this paper reads the paradox as an immunitary logic—managed inclusion of bodies without political belonging—recasting reciprocity, deservingness, and community.

Paper long abstract

Despite constitutional guarantees of emergency care for all persons on Italian territory, liver transplantation remains effectively inaccessible to undocumented migrants, except under narrowly defined “emergency” criteria. Clinically, transplantation is life-saving; in practice, eligibility is tied to a valid residence permit. By contrast, organ donation is not limited by migration status: under Italy’s modified presumed consent system, undocumented migrants may donate organs even though they would almost never qualify as recipients. This paper reads the resulting asymmetry as an immunitary technology that separates protection from belonging—immunitas without communitas

Transplantation is a privileged site for theorizing immunity because it is immunology made social. Graft survival requires immunosuppression and ongoing surveillance of rejection—the managed incorporation of biological alterity—while allocation and eligibility regimes decide whose alterity can be institutionally accommodated and whose must remain outside.

Drawing on a qualitative multi-sited ethnography of the Italian transplant system, I show how clinicians act as street-level bureaucrats, translating legal and clinical rules into decisions under ethical uncertainty and organizational constraint. Discretion concentrates in donor consent and kin recognition: whether to contact relatives, how to do so, and who counts as “family.” When kin are distant, legally precarious, or culturally misrecognized, providers improvise criteria that often hinge on moral judgments of deservingness. The outcome is a reversed reciprocity: migrants are largely excluded from cure in life yet rendered biologically useful in death. The paper calls for renewed ethical scrutiny of access, reciprocity, and inclusion in transplant governance.

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Paper short abstract

Limited access of migrants to healthcare will be analyzed in the framework of immunitarian politics. The case studies of Colombians and Ukrainians recently arrived to Poland will serve to showcase exclusionary policies, discourses and practices in healthcare resulting mainly from political shifts.

Paper long abstract

The paper will apply the concept of immunitarian politics to the analysis of the position of migrants in Poland, and in particularly their access the healthcare. I argue that reactionary politics of the right-wing government after 2015, political shift to the right and increasing populism has led to the exclusionary policies, discourses and practices in healthcare. If general access to healthcare can be seen as an expression of communitarian values (e.g. resulting from human rights, see: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), it is inspiring to see exclusions and limitations in the framework of immunitarian politics.

The first ethnographic case analyzed in this framework includes recent arrival of Colombian economic migrants, who were invited to Poland by employment agencies, and offered contracts of substandard character with very limited or no access to healthcare. The second case concerns Ukrainian war refugees residing in Poland since 2022 who had access to healthcare within temporary protection schemes, which partly ends in March 2026. In particular I will analyze governmental policies and discourses justifying these exclusions, as well as local practices experienced by migrants from both groups. The concept of immunitarian politics will relate to development of xenophobia, anti-migrant backlash and exclusion, looping from top-down and bottom-up.

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Paper short abstract

Homonationalism is used extensively to explain the reproduction of border violence by queer forcibly displaced people. Yet, displacing the nation state in analysis elucidates how feminist and queer political economies of care recreate colonial border violence through logics of immunity and purity.

Paper long abstract

The reproduction of border violence by queer forcibly displaced people after their arrival in destination countries is explained almost exclusively through the concept of homonationalism in the literature. The notion that these queer subjects are but recreating a callous logic of the state, however, obscures the very colonial violence it indexes, while also reproducing it. Displacing the sovereign nation state as the analytic frame par excellence yields significantly greater insight into the everyday recursive cultural production of the border and its regulation. Drawing from novel ethnographic research with queer forcibly displaced people and their allies in Melbourne, Australia, I explore the emic recursion of border violence within feminist and queer circles of community and care. Examining the classificatory systems which subtend individual and group projects of self-actualisation, I argue that the feminist and queer politics of care depend on, and hence safeguard, the yoking of self-legitimisation to the dispossession and domination of Others. Utilising the concept of generalised domestication (Hage, 2017), I thus explicate how (often well-meaning) actors routinely reproduce the very colonial violence that they otherwise avowedly oppose through a logic of immunity and purity (Stoler, 2021). I hence contend that while queerness proffers very real possibilities for otherwise, these political economies ensure that colonial control of the border endures through a moral sanitisation of the violence.