What is your research focus?

I work on questions of migration and belonging. I'm interested in experiences and representations of migration. What happens to people as they cross borders, and how do they understand the stakes of their journeys? How do people’s own accounts align with or challenge dominant cultural and political narratives? I focus on contemporary migration in Italy, where people from multiple world regions end up, hoping to build new lives or to transit elsewhere in Europe. Italy marks Europe’s southern borders, and Mediterranean Sea crossings to Italy have always been a part of lives there. At the same time, those journeys are especially dangerous and politically contentious today. 

My interest in the media and politics of migration means I work to understand how policy and political discourse affect people’s everyday lives and the ways they understand their circumstances and their possible futures. To understand those dynamics, I also explore connections between past and present—so in the case of Italy, for example, how disregarded colonial histories shape today’s migrations and racialized notions of belonging. A lot of my work focuses on what happens as people arrive and seek asylum. 

These interests have drawn me to ethnographic and narrative methods—so what happens and how does it get represented? What can we learn from overlapping or conflicting narratives? I work with interviews and engaged ethnography, film, social media, life writing, and visual art. And I keep returning to the ways that migrants’ accounts of their journeys disrupt dominant understandings of migration — meaning, how they challenge things like the refugee v. migrant binary, or the idea that someone moving to seek asylum is engaging in “illegal” movements. 

Across this work I engage critical refugee studies, which centers the refugee as a social and political actor and a producer of knowledge. For me, thinking about my work on Italian borders and Mediterranean migration through that lens has helped me develop work around a clear set of ethics.

What is a research project you are currently working on?

My first book has just come out. It’s called Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present, and it challenges the crisis and emergency framings that have become the default ways that we talk about migration, especially from the global south to the global north. I engage a range of testimonial narratives, in particular by Africans moving to Europe via Italy, whose witnessing challenges the idea that their presence or their movements constitute a crisis. This work is based on research that I did in Italy, including interviews with migrants at centers and camps, and people working or volunteering at reception centers there. 

The book shows how emergency responses to Mediterranean migration reproduce colonial logics, and how people on the move expose and challenge this violence. I hope the book advances conversations around the interconnectedness of migrant rights and racial justice issues, in Italy and beyond. 

Right now I’m working on projects about migrant farmworkers in Southern Europe, and about the changing politics of rescue at sea. Both projects connect to my broader interests in understanding how shifting policies and political discourses affect people’s material realities, and how people on the move and in solidarity are practicing citizenship and belonging in ways that refute some of the binary ways we often think about migration, and in ways that don’t rely on national framings.

Why University of Oregon?

I'm thrilled to be at an institution that is invested in interdisciplinary work. Getting to work and teach in Romance languages within the framework of GSL was an especially appealing aspect of the position. Pursuing my research on Mediterranean migration in an environment that recognizes the importance of regional and linguistic specialization, along with comparative and cross-regional work, was an exciting prospect. 

As I continue this research, I look forward to connecting and collaborating with UO colleagues and students who are doing fascinating work on rights, mobility, asylum, and belonging in many different places. It's exciting to join those conversations.

—Grace Connolly, College of Arts and Sciences