Join us for a seminar with visiting scholar Dr. Megan Carney on 9th November!
15.00-16.30
Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean
Abstract: With thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social justice. Island of Hope sheds light on the emergence of social solidarity initiatives and networks forged between citizens and noncitizens who work together to improve local livelihoods and mobilize for radical political change. Basing her argument on years of ethnographic fieldwork with frontline communities in Sicily, anthropologist Megan Carney asserts that such mobilizations hold significance not only for the rights of migrants, but for the material and affective well-being of society at large.
About the Speaker:
Megan Carney is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. She is a feminist ethnographer specializing in medical and sociocultural anthropology with active community-based collaborative research projects in the United States and Italy. Her primary research and teaching interests include critical migration and diaspora studies, critical food studies, health equity and social inequality, the food-climate-migration nexus, the politics of care and social solidarity, and feminist methodology and pedagogy. She is the author of two critically-acclaimed books, The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders (2015, University of California Press) which was awarded Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE and selected as a “California Book-to-Action”, and Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean (2021, University of California Press). Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Schuman European Union Public Affairs Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC-MEXUS), the Agnese Nelms Haury Foundation, the Udall Center for Public Policy, and USDA, among others. She was a Public Voices Fellow (2018-2019) with The OpEd Project and frequently publishes across a variety of media outlets, including in The Hill, The Conversation, Civil Eats, Latino Rebels, Inside Higher Ed, Scientific American, Sapiens, and Arizona Daily Star. Dr. Carney received her PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her BA in Anthropology and Italian from UCLA.
Read more about Dr. Carney’s work on her
Anthropology faculty page.
