In order to challenge the existing narratives surrounding refugee and migrant women, this seminar presents the outcomes of two interrelated projects that address women’s mobility across borders. These projects utilize case studies focusing on forced migration across the central Mediterranean route, as well as labor exploitation in the Sicilian countryside.

The presentation is centered around women’s bodies and narratives, examining how class, gender, and race inequalities shape physical and social borders, as well as the construction of gender violence. This seminar highlights the survival stories and experiences of migrant and refugee women, particularly highlighting their acts of resistance, challenging pf power structures, and assertion of rights

Presented by the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School for Social Research,  The New School, The University of Milan, and supported by Horizon2020 project ITHACA – Interconnecting Histories and Archives for Migrant Agency: Entangled Narratives Across Europe and the Mediterranean Region (funded by the European Union); PRIN2020 project MOBS – Mobilities, solidarities and imaginaries across the borders: the mountain, the sea, the urban and the rural as spaces of transit and encounters (funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research); Horizon MSCA Global Fellowship MEMODIAS – Memory Practices of the Afghan and Somali Diasporas in the USA and Italy (funded by the European Union).

Monica Massari, PhD., Associate Professor, is based at the Department of International, Legal and Historical-Political Studies, University of Milan, where she teaches Sociology of Memory, Global Societies and Rights, and Comparative Social Systems and is the vice-coordinator of the PhD Programme in “Studies on Organized Crime”. Her research focuses on forced migration across the Mediterranean, gender dynamics and new forms of racism and discrimination in Europe. She currently coordinates a number of European (Horizon2020 ITHACA) and national projects (MOBS and TRAMIGRART) in these fields and was elected to the Board of the RC-Biography and Society of the International Association of Sociology-ISA (2023-2027). She is the Scientific Coordinator of the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Global Fellowship MEMODIAS on memory practices of the Afghan and Somali Diasporas in the USA and Italy (PI: Dr Gianluca Gatta) carried out in collaboration with The New School for Social Research, Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. Among her recent publications: Affectivity, Embodied Knowledge and Reflexivity in Creative Biographical Research on Migration in the Mediterranean Context (with G. Gatta and S. Miceli, in Ethnic and Racial Studies 2024), A Wounded Land. Migrant Women and Forms of Exploitation and Resistance in the Sicilian Countryside (with F. Cabras and S. Miceli, Milano University Press-MUP, 2024) and Our Lives and Bodies Matter: Memories of Violence and Strategies of Resistance among Migrants Crossing the Mediterranean (in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16/2022).

Monica Salmon Gomez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research (NSSR). Her research focuses on the intersection of border, mobility, and feminist studies. Her dissertation, a trajectory ethnography, examines the experiences of people on the move to the United States from and through Mexico and Central America. She focuses on the survival and care strategies employed by these individuals to navigate the challenges of restrictive migratory policies, immobilization, and criminal violence. Additionally, her work investigates how they navigate, perform, and strategically utilize bureaucratic categories imposed upon them by state authorities and humanitarian institutions throughout their journey.