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Paper short abstract

This paper examines refugees’ im/mobile becomings in an Italian mountain province, showing how everyday and onward mobilities are integral to grounding themselves locally. It troubles polarized views of mobility and stasis by centering unequal experiences and aspirations of rural staying.

Paper long abstract

This paper originates from a broader research project on the staying experiences of refugees who continue to live in rural and small-town locations after the end of official reception periods. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in a mountainous province of northern Italy, I zoom in on West African interlocutors’ efforts to re-ground and emplace themselves in small towns while simultaneously aspiring to remain mobile. I analyze their everyday and seasonal mobility practices as integral to their efforts at regaining agency and a sense of normalcy following experiences of containment and forced relocation within the reception system.

Ethnographic examples include seasonal and circular mobility practices, vertical mobilities to higher-altitude sites of labor and leisure, and the prevalence of “mobility talk” in interactions among friends and with me as the researcher. I show how age, gender, and positioning within transnational social fields, and broader regimes of migration governance shape these im/mobility practices and their underlying imaginaries. At the same time, I analyze these dynamics in the context of other im/mobilities characterizing this mountain region, including global tourist flows, forms of privileged mobility, and trends of young people leaving, remaining in, and returning to this depopulating area.

Building on scholarship from anthropology, rural studies, migration and mobility studies, the paper troubles rigid dichotomies between mobility and stasis, agency and constraint by centering precarious migrants’ im/mobile becomings in rural and mountain spaces.