In the current European political discourse, the historical imaginary of migrants and refugees as a threat to cultural traditions and values resounds. New nationalist narratives are emerging to defend memory and cultural heritage, legitimizing social exclusion, abuse, and the dispossession of rights of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe. Within such a context, the traces of refugee and migrant experiences, the violence committed against them, and the solidarities they share and receive, are subject to erasure; while their memory practices, innovations, sociality and transformative political agency are typically neglected. Migrants share experiences of oppression, violence and struggle with each other and with the people they encounter, but these experiences are not publicly recognized, and their memories exceed the conventional boundaries of nations and the public heritage associated with them.

Through a comparative perspective connecting migrants’ trajectories between Sudan, the Horn of Africa, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Italy, in the context of war, and political and structural violence, this research offers a distinctive contribution to debates about public memory and migration. It rethinks heritage from the perspective of human mobility, while putting violence, social exclusion and human rights violations at the centre of the analysis. It focuses on memory-making relating to migration journeys, sites of violations, migrant struggles and spaces of sanctuary in order to unravel their varied and contested meanings and relations to political communities, solidarities, and struggles for justice. It not only explores the creative ways in which migrants claim social recognition, but also connects and amplifies the shared memory of acts of solidarity by and with migrants through the creation of a digital archive. It also attends to African cultures of migration, since human mobility is embedded into complex cultural repertoires, dynamics of social reproduction, political conditions and economic transformations; the desire to migrate is transmitted across generations and through previous social networks of mobility. Fundamentally, through both theory and practice, the project is concerned with the question of how cultural heritage might contribute to counteracting exclusion and violence against migrants and promoting socially just and sustainable futures for Europe and Africa.

Key questions

Tracing and theorizing migrant memory making practices:

• How is migration interconnected to political dynamics of memory and forgetting and how are migration experiences shared or contested among publics, hosting societies and migrants?

• How do migrants remember and share their journeys across Africa to/and Europe and experiences of violence and loss or of collective protests? How are digital technologies harnessed in memory-making processes and how do ICTs contribute to producing a mobile repertoire of migrants’ journeys?

• How do the traces of mobility, violence and solidarity unsettle or enrich existing conceptual analyses of ‘cultural heritage’?

Linking migrant memories to struggles for rights and justice:

• How and to what extent are the memory of shared struggles and acts of solidarity by and with migrants mobilized in pursuit of political change and justice?

• To what extent are cultural and public representations produced along migration routes are trapped within ethnic or national framings and implicated in the construction of migration as a social threat?

• How are practices of memory making pursued and altered through experiences of mobility? To what extent are these practices relevant to agendas for public recognition justice?

Methodological approach

The research builds an innovative bridge between refugee and migration studies, anthropological approaches to memory, the political sociology of memory and justice, gender/feminist perspectives on violence and subjectivity to develop a bottom-up understanding of the nexus between cultural heritage and human mobility. It will involve researchers, activists, refugees and migrants in diverse research endeavors along routes and at sites of displacement in Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Italy, in places where migrants stay, temporarily or in a protracted way (zones of confinement; camps; urban contexts). We will draw upon and develop the experience of the research team by focusing on migrants’ journeys between Horn of Africa, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Italy. The selection of these countries corresponds in part to actual migration routes, from African countries to Europe via the central Mediterranean. Yet this project challenges the representation of migration in terms of linear flows heading to Europe as well as the North-South divide in the Mediterranean space. It explores these regions not only as spaces of transit but also as spaces of refuge, confinement, detention and hospitality, and interrogates the possibilities of the Mediterranean as a renewed cultural and political community.