Convenors
Marcello Maneri, University of Milano-Bicocca
marcello.maneri@unimib.it (corresponding scholar)
Andrea Pogliano, University of Piemonte orientale
andrea.pogliano@uniupo.it
“Race” occupies a paradoxical position in contemporary Italy: widely delegitimized as an explicit category of public discourse, it nevertheless continues to organize differences, belonging, opportunities, and institutional practices. This panel examines how race becomes operative precisely when it is not explicitly named: how it is produced, translated, made visible, concealed, incorporated, or contested.
Racialization does not necessarily rely on the language of race or on explicit biological classifications. Race may function as a mobile signifier (Hall 1997), emerging through registers that evoke non-whiteness or incomplete belonging. The panel is therefore concerned with the processes through which social and institutional conditions are transformed into characteristics of groups, distributing suspicion, vulnerability, mobility, and access to resources.
The panel welcomes ethnographic and qualitative research from any relevant field—including politics, media, institutional practices, services, markets, migration and asylum, and cultural production—that traces the circulation and transformation of racialized categories across institutions, public representations, and everyday interactions. Contributions connecting discourses, practices, and apparatuses are particularly encouraged.
Open questions
The panel focuses on four related questions:
- How is race produced and made operative when it is not explicitly named?
- Through which translations and substitutions among colour, origin, culture, religion, class, gender, language, and legal status do processes of racialization take shape?
- How do racialized categories circulate and change across institutions, public representations, and everyday interactions?
- How are these processes embodied, negotiated, rejected, or contested by racialized subjects, and what forms of belonging or hierarchy emerge in response?
The panel does not seek contributions that merely document inequality or discrimination. We particularly welcome papers that reconstruct the processes through which inequalities are racialized, naturalized, institutionalized, or challenged, including the role of whiteness as an unmarked position.
Keywords
Race; racialization; whiteness; belonging; inequalities
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
Sociology of migration and intercultural relations; communication studies; sociology of work and organizations; urban studies and social geography; sociology of education; citizenship, borders, and control studies.
References
Hall, S. 1997. Race, the Floating Signifier, in “Media Education Foundation”, https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf.
Convenors’ bio
Marcello Maneri is Associate Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca where he teaches Media and Cultural sociology. His research focuses on the sociology of racism, on media and elite discourse about migration, crime, and security, and on episodes of moral panic. He recently published “An Ugly Word. Rethinking race in Italy and the United States”, Russell-Sage, 2022 (with Ann Morning) and “How media narratives on migration become nativist. A case-oriented comparative approach based on journalistic sub-genres”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2025.
Andrea Pogliano is an associate professor at the University of Eastern Piedmont, where he teaches Sociology of Communication, Public Sector Communication, and Narratives of Migration. His research focuses on news production, visual journalism, and political and media representations of migration. He is the author of Media, politica e migrazioni in Europa. Una prospettiva sociologica (Carocci, 2019). He recently co-authored the article “Changing the Story: The Production of Alternative Narratives on Migration,” published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies in 2025.