Cohort: SOMET 40

Topic of the thesis: Exposed bodies: clinical spatializations of borders in «credibility» diagnoses and «eligibility» evaluations 

Abstract: The project aims to investigate the relationship between public health institutions and the politics of migration under the light of the heuristic category of «exposition», according a central relevance to «physico-political» ethnography (Pizza and Ravenda, 2012) in dialogue with the approaches of Critical Border Studies.
The intention is to explore the specific modalities of spatialization of medical knowledge (Foucault, 1963) on asylum seekers' and migrants' bodies under a double perspective: firstly, the regime of the administration of evidence and proof within the asylum request procedure (Fassin and Rechtman, 2007), that contributes to the proliferation of clinical acts such as diagnoses of «credibility» formalized through forensic medicine and psychiatry certificates; secondly, the regime of exclusion that exposes bodies to a medical gaze delegated to establish their «eligibility» to administrative detention praxis. The focus of the research will be to analyse the everyday practices dwelled in public clinics in order to grasp the processes through which health institutions embody a mandate that could be situated between care and social control in respect to migration policies.
The starting hypothesis relies on the fact that in this sphere medical knowledge seems to work as a particular «technology of [anti-]citizenship» (Beneduce, 2013; Inda, 2006; Khosravi, 2010) that contribute to neoliberal selective inclusion (Ambrosini et al., 1995; Mezzadra, 2004) and, simultaneously, to the functioning of expulsion mechanisms (Sassen, 2014) in anomic – and anomalous – spaces of Law (Buffa, 2023). The argument is that, through ethnographical methodology, it is possible to identify the directrix of these dynamics in the specific form (Rahola, 2007) of "exposition" of corporeality as concrete spatialization of clinical borders on migrants' bodies. This would allow not only to reconsider the profiles of suffering interconnecting the individual, the institutional and the structural levels and questioning which role health professionals could assume (Basaglia, 1971; 1975), but also to investigate the relation between bodies, State and epistemic powers (Pizza, 2007).

Research interests: Critical Criminology and Border Studies; Political Anthropology of Health, Body and Violence; History of Madness and Deinstitutionalization

Graduated from: University of Turin (BA; MA); University of Padova (MA)

Degrees obtained: BA in Philosophy (University of Turin); MA in Critical Criminology (University of Padova); MA in Anthropology (University of Turin) 

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