Over two days, scholars, writers, practitioners, activists, and students across institutions are coming together virtually to explore the relationship between borders, captivity, and memory, and how it shapes the racialization of migration and the construction of national identity.

Given Italy’s porous position as a southern European nation with complex histories of internal migration, emigration, and immigration, Italy and the Mediterranean region are critical contexts for understanding how processes of migration, racialization, and transcultural mediation have shaped public and cultural discourse about identity and belonging from nineteenth century emigration and colonialism, to today’s arrivals via the Mediterranean Sea.