From November 17 to 19, the Saint-Jean d’Angély campus will host an international symposium on the theme “Mobilities, Surveillance, Assistance in the Western Mediterranean (16th-21st centuries).”
In light of a pressing current issue, this symposium provides an opportunity for researchers from 8 countries to place into historical, sociological, anthropological, legal, and political perspective the movement of people across the Western Mediterranean and its control over the past five centuries.
The event will also help link research to ongoing citizen-led initiatives.
For a long time, the cosmopolitan and highly attractive areas (commerce, tourism, industry…) of the Western Mediterranean have been characterized by constant contact with otherness, fostering both attractions and movements of populations as well as redefinitions and tensions of identity.
The era of globalization does not prevent certain areas from strongly asserting, sometimes violently, their particularity, where religion and political powers serve as a powerful tool for defining and framing societies, an essential marker of identities.
Among these areas where antagonisms resurface without hindering exchanges and human mobility, the shores of the Western Mediterranean provide a relevant framework for studying coastal societies over the long term, focusing on mobilities and various forms of acceptance, assistance, regulation, or rejection of these mobilities, seen by authorities and individuals as both a source of wealth and dangers (identity, economic, social, etc.).
The symposium is organized into 5 sessions:
International Mobilities and Circulations
Migrations, Urban World, World of Work
Religious, Charitable, Health Assistance
Citizen Initiatives: Ongoing Actions with Migrants at the Italian Border
Surveillance of Mobilities, Institutional Control
