Convenors
Andrea Calabretta, University of Padua
andrea.calabretta@unipd.it – corresponding convenor
Francesco Della Puppa, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
francesco.dellapuppa@unive.it
The intersection between migration and territorial contexts is by now a broad and well-established field of research. However, research has concentrated above all on the relationship between immigration and the city – both metropolises and medium-sized cities, taken as a scale for analysing migratory processes (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018) – and, more recently, on the dimensions of dwelling and place-making, which read migrant settlement through the home and the everyday production of places (Boccagni and Kusenbach 2020).
The relationship between migration and rural or small urban areas has received less sustained attention. These places share, to varying degrees, a smaller scale of social life: relations are more personalised, fostering familiarity as well as social control, and migrant presence follows dynamics of visibility and invisibility distinct from those of larger, more anonymous urban settings. When these areas do enter the research agenda, they usually do so in a subordinate form: as the backdrop to other objects of inquiry – as with agricultural labour and its supply chains (Colloca and Corrado 2013) – or through the question of the presence and accessibility of services in low-density territories (Barberis and Boccagni 2014). A partial renewal has come from the framework of migratory stratifications (Della Puppa et al. 2024), which has shown how successive arrivals redefine hierarchies and positions outside metropolises. Yet the social, relational and symbolic dynamics that migrant settlement generates in these contexts call for further analysis.
The Italian case offers a valuable vantage point for this debate: the capillary spread of migrant settlement, more pronounced than in other European countries, reflects the country’s urban and productive dispersion. Small municipalities, industrial districts, agricultural areas and peri-urban belts have for decades been ordinary sites of migrant presence (Balbo 2015). How this morphological and productive feature interacts with migratory dynamics remains an open question. Despite the specificity of the Italian case, similar questions arise elsewhere in Europe and call for comparative analysis.
The session aims to contribute to this debate by bringing together recent ethnographic research conducted in small urban and rural places affected by migration. The ethnographic approach seems particularly suited to capturing the fine grain of contexts where the migrant presence is often numerically small and barely visible in statistical surveys, yet highly visible in local public discourse. We welcome empirical contributions from migration studies, urban and territorial studies, studies of local services and welfare, religious studies and labour studies, with the aim of bringing into dialogue fields that rarely meet around these territories.
Open questions
- How does migration encounter rural and small urban communities, and how does it transform them?
- How do processes of inclusion and exclusion take shape in these contexts?
- What representations of the migrant presence circulate among the actors involved (migrants, residents, local administrations, the third sector)?
- What role do local labour and housing markets play in shaping trajectories of settlement and mobility?
- How are religious, associational and community practices organised in low-density territories?
- How do the succession and overlapping over time of different migratory flows redefine social hierarchies and positions in rural and small urban territories?
- How does the capillary spread of migrant settlement in Italy speak to the dynamics observed in other European contexts?
- How do national urban systems, reception and dispersal policies, and welfare regimes shape migrant settlement in rural and small urban areas across European countries?
- What adjustments does ethnographic practice require in dispersed contexts, where the migrant presence is thinly spread and barely visible?
Keywords
migrant settlement; small urban areas; rural territories; place-making; inclusion/exclusion; migratory stratifications; local welfare
Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
sociology of migration; urban and territorial studies; sociology of work; sociology of religion; welfare and service studies; social geography; social anthropology
References
Balbo M. (ed.) (2015), Migrazioni e piccoli comuni, FrancoAngeli, Milan.
Barberis E., Boccagni P. (2014), Blurred Rights, Local Practices: Social Work and Immigration in Italy, British Journal of Social Work, 44(s1).
Boccagni P., Kusenbach M. (2020), For a Comparative Sociology of Home, Current Sociology, 68(5).
Çağlar A., Glick Schiller N. (2018), Migrants and City-Making. Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration, Duke University Press, Durham.
Colloca C., Corrado A. (eds) (2013), La globalizzazione delle campagne. Migrazioni e società rurali nel Sud d’Italia, FrancoAngeli, Milan.
Della Puppa, F., Sanò, G., Storato, G. (2024), Migratory stratifications. A new perspective to observe the intersection between migration and social change. In Della Puppa, F., Sanò, G., Storato, G. (a cura di) Migratory stratifications. A new perspective on migration and social change through the Italian lens (1-25). Sale: Transnational Press London.
Convenors’ bios
Andrea Calabretta is a research fellow at the University of Padua. In 2023, he defended a doctoral thesis based on multi-sited research into Tunisian migration to Italy and its transnational dimension, reread through the lens of Bourdieu’s theory (Towards Transnationality as Practice, Routledge, 2026). He has carried out research in Milan and in various areas of the Veneto region on the labour-market incorporation of migrants and the trajectories of their descendants, working across empirical research and social theory. His research interests include the biographical trajectories of the descendants of migrants, identity construction among migrants and their descendants, European Islam, and processes of civic and social inclusion and exclusion.
Francesco Della Puppa is Associate Professor in General Sociology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He is interested in international migration; migrant family and family reunification; labour and social conflict; migrant work; digital work; everyday-life; Bangladeshi Diaspora; ethnography and qualitative social research: topics on which he has published extensively in prestigious international academic journals and book series. Lately, he has been interested in social sciences and comic, (ethno)graphic novels, and in establishing academic, scientific, social and human relations with Cuba.