Inhaltspezifische Aktionen

Guest Lecture by Dr. Simona Adinolfi: "Posthumanist Approaches to Migration: The Case of the Italian Agricultural Labor Exploitation System"

Wann

20.01.2025 von 16:00 bis 18:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC100)

Wo

Phil. I, A 3 (Hörsaal), Zoom

Name des Kontakts

Termin zum Kalender hinzufügen

iCal

In this class, we are going to reflect on how critical posthumanism can be a helpful theoretical approach to understand the dynamics of migration in the 21st century. After a brief introduction to posthumanism, we are going to discuss the introduction to Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery, and reflect on the concept of “dehumanism” in the context of migration. Dehumanism is a theory developed within the posthumanist critical theory. It has its origins in ecocriticism but is helpful to reconsider migration without victimizing the migrant and re-establishing their agency and dignity. In the context of dehumanism, Singh also speaks of “humanitarian fetishism” as the “process of obscuring the complicity of humanitarian agents whose systems of inequality they seek to redress” (26). After establishing the main concepts related to critical posthumanism and dehumanism, we are going to analyze a specific case study, namely, the representation of the Italian labor exploitation system in the Italian media.

In Italy, undocumented migrants are often involved in an exploitative system of agricultural labor, called “caporalato”. The word “caporalato” comes from the term “caporale” (gangmaster), the person who finds and employs undocumented migrants in agricultural jobs illegally, without insurance, and for very little money. After a brief overview of the phenomenon and its presence in Italy, we will look at images and tropes of “caporalato” in traditional (newspapers, television) and digital (social networks) media and will try to analyze them by keeping in mind the idea of dehumanization and mastery proposed by Singh. Interestingly, despite the phenomenon is named after the exploiter, images of “caporalato” hardly ever depict the perpetrator, the master, and focus either on victimized migrant or on the agricultural product that is obtained in this exploitation system. Through Singh’s theory and posthumanism, we will interrogate the role of technology in the representation of migrant labor exploitation, the ethics of representation of phenomenon and we will reflect on alternative, ethical ways of representing and documenting the lives of exploited migrants in Italy.  

https://uni-giessen.zoom-x.de/j/63108494346?pwd=RRyxjjOphkLSanJfrK8VuM1w5CqfXh.1

Meeting-ID: 631 0849 4346
Kenncode: 909276