Paper Short Abstract:

Based on my two-year fieldwork in Chinatown, Prato, I argue that the researcher's body politic can often be an "in-betweener", a piece of human infrastructure that deploys to link people and processes otherwise disconnected in urban migration contexts.

Paper Abstract:

I spent four months in Prato, Tuscany, at the beginning of 2023 trying to find my place in the city. I was a complete outsider and had to build my cultural competency from scratch. I was a Romanian middle-aged woman starting her doctoral research. I was neither Chinese, nor Italian, and I felt I had no claim over the research field. My Mandarin language was still rudimentary and I still had difficulties expressing myself in Italian after only a year of living in the country.

I was a disconnected female immigrant from the global South doing research in the North, with a preference for a cosmopolitan East Asian aesthetic, formed through years of cosmopolitan consumption of pop culture (anime, cinema, television, fashion, martial arts, videogames, art etc.) But given time, I found other women who embodied multiculturalism and positioned themselves as connectors in the city's human fabric. Together with them, in three different, yet connected case studies – an art association, an afterschool, and through fandom - I became part of a human infrastructure that deployed itself in-between to link disconnected processes and groups of people otherwise unconnected.

My own ethnic, cultural aand emotional “in-betweenness” - defined as a form of embodied multiculturalism that, in a specific place and at a specific time, is positioned (politically, socially, or culturally) to reorganize coexistence in the multicultural city – shaped my research, conceptualization, and interpretation of the field.