Calcio popolare

: solidarity grassroots football and the lives and senses of belonging of people seeking asylum in Italy

Abstract

Over the past 10 years, an unprecedented number of people have crossed the
Mediterranean Sea to reach Italy, find refuge and build a new life in Europe. As a consequence, issues around immigration and asylum have heated the Italian political and public debate. The effects of increasingly restrictive migration policies are resisted on the ground by a wide range of actors, from NGOs and civic associations to social movements and informal groups of citizens. In these “local battlegrounds” (Ambrosini at al., 2020) grassroots football is mobilised in solidarity with refugees and people seeking asylum.

Through an ethnographic exploration of two such projects, this thesis investigates the role played by solidarity grassroots football in the lives and senses of belonging of people seeking asylum in Italy. By analysing the 2018 Immigration and Security Decree and the 2019 Follow Up Security Decree, and participants’ lived experiences vis-à-visthese policies, I will identify the impact of the government’s politics of belonging on people seeking asylum’s lives and senses of belonging. Although these politics significantly affected the spatial and temporal dimensions of participants’ lives, I argue that people seeking asylum showed agency in negotiating and resisting the impact of restrictive policies. By exploring the meanings people seeking asylum gave to their involvement in solidarity grassroots football, I demonstrate the extent to which grassroots football was appropriated by participants in this process of resistance.

Through an analysis of the ways in which senses of belonging were constructed within and through participation in these projects, I will discuss the role of grassroots football in the senses of belonging of people seeking asylum. I suggest that an approach that actively engages with spaces beyond football may provide forms of belonging more effective in mitigating the marginalising impacts of restrictive asylum policies and opening up spaces for people seeking asylum to emerge as claim-making subjects.

Date of Award	May 2021
Original language	English
Sponsors	Department for the Economy
Supervisor	Ciaran Acton (Supervisor), Maire Braniff (Supervisor), Markus Ketola (Supervisor), Maire Braniff (Supervisor) & Ciaran Acton (Supervisor)