Lives who do (not) matter : Doing biographical research on migration and the spectacle of suffering and resistance in the Mediterranean

Since the explosion of the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 and the introduction of increasingly restrictive policies, at both national and international level, aimed at preventing migrants from crossing European borders, the topic of irregular migration over the Mediterranean has gained high visibility in public debate as well as on the international research agenda. While in the past most research in this field was based on analysing official data and institutional records, media coverage and interviews with experts, more recently the use of biographical narratives and life histories – two of the main tools that allow complex spheres, such as those related to emotions, memory and identity, to be explored – has become more widespread. These pieces of research actually provide a unique insight into the phenomenon and thus contrast with official representations and state-oriented accounts, often ideologically biased and more inclined to assess the success or failure of legislative measures or administrative and law-enforcement strategies. The accounts given by refugees, those who escaped from conflict and persecution, and so-called clandestine exiles, however, often recall the memories of those who survived the most notorious massacres of the twentieth century. The violence, humiliation and suffering that migrants increasingly experience on their journeys to Europe not only requires a critical synthesis of the historical and social matrices and asymmetrical power structures that contribute to producing the status of clandestinity and that have created an enormous underwater cemetery in the Mediterranean Sea. They also force social scientists to consider that these complex social phenomena lie within an intricate web of relationships and dynamics that cannot be properly investigated and governed without an adequate understanding of their crucial human dimension. On the one hand, migrants are often construed by the media as pure and naked victims of events, universal objects of sympathy, to be looked at with pietas and sorrow, or simply lives who do not matter, given the generalized state of collective atrophy in European public opinion. And yet, on the other, all this imagery often diverts our attention, preventing it from focusing on their agency, resources and abilities which, on the contrary, often resist and struggle against dominant narratives and, if adequately dealt with, might have crucial implications for a new approach towards the governance of the phenomenon. In this regard, adopting a politics of the voice, aimed not only at providing migrants with the chance to speak for themselves but also at reshaping the conditions of visibility of their narratives and subjectivities within the wider public arena, often struggles with the methodological and ethical implications of our work as social scientists and most likely requires a more critical assessment of the tools generally used in this field.