Ecologies of remembrance: Situating the afterlives of migrant dead at sea in Italy (1997–2019) | LSHTM

Datum
29. April 2022 

We are delight­ed to be host­ing Dr Vanes­sa Grot­ti to give our next LSHTM Med­ical Anthro­pol­o­gy Sem­i­nar: Ecolo­gies of remem­brance: Sit­u­at­ing the after­lives of migrant dead at sea in Italy (1997–2019).

Abstract

This pre­sen­ta­tion is based on data Dr Vanes­sa Grot­ti has col­lect­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Naor Ben-Yehoy­a­da, Anthro­pol­o­gy, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and Marc Bright­man, Cul­tur­al Her­itage, Uni­ver­si­ty of Bologna for a small, mul­ti-sit­ed ethno­graph­ic research project fund­ed by the Wen­ner-Gren foun­da­tion which start­ed in 2018 and will end lat­er this year. Their aim is to analyse anthro­po­log­i­cal­ly the mar­itime, foren­sic and mor­tu­ary prac­tices (per­formed at sea and on land) linked to the mate­r­i­al, social and rit­u­al man­age­ment of uniden­ti­fied migrant human remains in Italy. 

Dr Vanes­sa Grot­ti will intro­duce the region­al migra­tion con­text, and the rea­sons why focus­ing on the receiv­ing, ‘host’ coun­try rais­es inter­est­ing ques­tions for the anthro­pol­o­gy of death, the body and mate­ri­al­i­ty. She will then present the spe­cif­ic mar­itime tragedies which frame the project (with a spe­cif­ic focus on my field research in south­ern Italy and Alba­nia) and how they are con­nect­ed, before reflect­ing on how these dif­fer­ent fields con­verge and par­tic­i­pate in con­tem­po­rary region­al and nation­al process­es of memo­ri­al­i­sa­tion and pat­ri­mo­ni­al­i­sa­tion of the migrant dead in the Mediterranean. 

Speaker  

Dr Vanes­sa Grot­ti is an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in Anthro­pol­o­gy at the Depart­ment of Cul­tur­al Her­itage of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bologna. She is a social and med­ical anthro­pol­o­gist with long-term ethno­graph­ic field expe­ri­ence in Low­land South Amer­i­ca and the Mediter­ranean. She recent­ly con­clud­ed a Euro­pean Research Coun­cil-fund­ed project enti­tled EU Bor­der Care which exam­ined migra­tion and repro­duc­tive care in EU bor­der­lands. She has pub­lished on med­i­cine and colo­nial­ism, gen­der and repro­duc­tive health, migra­tion and bor­der­lands, per­son­hood, ani­mism and mate­r­i­al cul­ture, and foren­sics and memorialisation. 

Her most recent pub­li­ca­tions include Migrant Hos­pi­tal­i­ties in the Mediter­ranean: Encoun­ters with Alter­i­ty in Birth and Death (co-edit­ed with Marc Bright­man, Pal­grave, 2021) and Nur­tur­ing the Oth­er: First Con­tacts and the Mak­ing of Chris­t­ian Bod­ies in Ama­zo­nia (Berghahn, 2022).