Venue: Room G009, ground floor, 28 rue des Saints-Pères - 75007 Paris

 

 

 

Speaker:
Tiziana Caponio, Prof. University of Turin and Collegio Carlo Alberto

 

The sudden arrival of asylum seekers and refugees in many European small localities in the last two decades and more specifically, in the aftermath of the 2015 crisis, has been often regarded as yet another burden for places ‘off-the-map’ or places that do not matter. Whereas some scholars emphasise the sense of abandonment and place resentment underlying hostile environments in many rural areas, others seem rather to point to the specific situation of economic deprivation characterising de-industrialisation in small and medium-sized urban centres. However, there is still a scarce understanding of the conditions and mechanisms that, in different types of small localities, can lead to the emergence of a migration-radical right link. Building upon research findings from the Whole-COMM project (www.whole-comm.eu), in this presentation I aim to go beyond explanations based the demand side, i.e. local residents attitudes towards migration, to focus on the supply side, i.e. on the role of political leadership, local policies and modes of governance in small localities, to understand how these factors shape and feed into mechanisms of polarization which are specific to small places. 

 

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Scientific coordinators: Catherine Wihtol de Wenden,  Hélène Le Bail, Hélène Thiollet, Antoine Pécoud, Catherine Perron et Thomas Lacroix