Migration and Labour Working Group: Roundtables

Labour is one of the crucial relations that migrant subjects establish with their new homelands and, in many cases, is one of the most profound drivers shaping their trajectories and experiences. Labour is not always thematised as such in migrant narratives: however, it is often there, in the foreground or in the background, as a presence or as an absence, with very different connotations (from exploitation to emancipation), concealed by more powerful tropes and motifs such as home, food, and language (see Jennifer Burns, Migrant Imaginaries, Peter Lang, 2013). 

Given these coordinates, the Migration and Labour research group has established a new field of research related to artistic representations of labour in narratives of migration and of migration in labour narratives, from a comparative perspective, across different languages, nations, genres, and media.

In order to fruitfully study migration and labour together, the group organized in 2022 a series of six roundtables on topics linking migration and labour together:

1) Definitions

2) Autobiography 

3) Estrangement 

4) Body 

5) Torture 

6) Automation 

The general aim of the roundtables has been exploring the ways in which lived experiences of migration and labour relate to literary and artistic production in terms of both content (i.e., as themes) and form (i.e., in terms of language and literary devices)