| Narrative
Category: Lines of Flight
Posts on Politics, Culture, and Travels
Frontex and Polytechnic: Another vote to confirm the agreement and further connivance with human rights violations
Note: this open letter was also published in Italian in the newspaper La Stampa (see below for the scan of the article)
The EU anti-fraud unit (Olaf) report on Frontex is clear. The Agency ignores the human rights of people in transit across the Mediterranean and the Balkans. There is proof of how Frontex's planes and drones have witnessed migrants drowning in the high sea between Lybia and Italy, and they did not intervene. This is not only a violation of Article 18 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (right to asylum) but also, more simply and fundamentally, of Article 2 (right to life) and numerous international maritime conventions requiring anyone witnessing situations of distress in the high sea to intervene or alert bodies capable of intervention. Frontex systematically avoided any kind of intervention on purpose, on a number of occasions, violating the fundamental right to life of the people in situations of peril on those boats. The Agency itself recognised this, at least implicitly, when its Director resigned seven months ago at the surfacing of the first revelations from the (at the time undisclosed) Olaf report.
As it is known, my Department at the Polytechnic of Turin, where I am full Professor of Political and Economic Geography, provides cartography services to Frontex. This association between the two institutions is problematic not only because there is no way to know how Frontex will use the maps (potentially, to pursue the further violation of human rights), but also because, by proxy, everyone in my Department, me included, is now relatable with the doings of the Agency. This is not just a problem of image, but a serious ethical question: can I carry 'ethical' research work, if my Institution is doing affairs with a third party who is involved in the systematic violation of human rights?
For a year, some of us have been forcefully fighting this agreement (back story, in ENG and ITA). In one of the latest chapters of this story, just a few weeks ago, in an unprecedented move, the University of Turin officially asked the Polytechnic to take an active stance against this agreement with the Agency (in ENG, and ITA). Yet, not the overwhelming evidence of the Olaf report, nor the stances of researchers and students in Turin, are enough for my employer to reconsider their untenable position. Following the request from the University yesterday, the Senate of the Polytechnic of Turin was asked once again to vote on the opportunity to maintain the collaboration between my Department and Frontex and, by 19 votes against 29, the Senate voted to maintain the agreement (as reported by Luca Rondi in Altreconomia). As if nothing matters. As if the Mediterranean and its bodies are on another plane of existence. As if collaborating with Frontex was just a technical matter: something detached from the doings of the Agency.
If this is science, as a scientist, I am ashamed. I am angry, furious. It is unacceptable that a public University such as the Polytechnic refuses to confront the overarching amount of evidence against Frontex. It is unacceptable that this has not become a major point of ethical concern: a point where the praxis of doing academic labour can acquire, or lose its sense entirely. To me, yesterday, with that vote, the Polytechnic lost the little credibility they had left. There is no possible talking of 'ethics', now. No possible bombastic speech on 'research excellence'. We are complicit: this is what 'science' is at this time in Europe. For the students, and for the very few researchers who are still seeing things otherwise, I will work so that this is not the end.
The University of Turin against Frontex (and against the Polytechnic). The fight continues.
The fight to keep Frontex out of our universities continues.
In the summer of 2021, my Department (DIST) at the Politecnico di Torino signed a contract to produce cartography for Frontex (the European Coast Guard and Border Agency). The agreement – passed without any problems in the Department's Council – was presented as one of the best representations of research excellence at DIST (see the original press release here).
With (very few) colleagues, we contested the contract but to no avail. At that point, the same was the subject of a series of enquiries by journalist Luca Rondi of Altreconomia, to which was added my public stance of denunciation. This was followed by numerous articles in national and international media, as well as student demonstrations, collective meetings and mobilisations to push the Polytechnic to terminate the contract. The reasons that make this agreement unacceptable are related to the work of Frontex: already in the summer of 2021 it was evident that the agency did not respect human rights, operating forced rejections at the European borders both directly (on the Balkan route) and indirectly (passing information to the so-called Libyan Coast Guard) (see my public statement, in Italian, for a summary of these reasons – In English, read here).
At that point, media pressure on the case intensified (involving publications such as Internazionale, Wired, and RAI – for a list see this file), as well as student and activist mobilisation, on a national scale. Faced with all this, the Academic Senate of the Politecnico di Torino decided to discuss the agreement in an extraordinary session on 14 December 2021. Three options were on the table: termination, suspension or continuation of the agreement with the addition of a hypothetical 'safeguard clause' with which the parties (DIST, the Politecnico and Frontex) would undertake to respect 'human rights' in the execution of the contract. The Senate, by a very large majority (21 out of 25), chose to maintain the contract with the inclusion of this clause (in Italian, Luca Rondi's piece; In English, on my blog).
A few months later, again Luca Rondi, through civic access on Frontex, discovered that the Agency knew nothing about this clause, and therefore the contract went ahead without it. Its insertion, in any case, would not have changed anything: how can the Polytechnic expect Frontex to respect human rights, when not even the European Court of Justice can? The fact remains that, even in the face of this news, which in fact de-legitimised the vote of the Politecnico's Academic Senate, everything in Turin continued to remain silent: my Department (DIST) continued to produce maps for Frontex (In Italian, Luca Rondi). In light of all this, I continued – this time with my colleague Francesca Governa – with internal pressure, but without ever receiving any response (read here).
In recent months, Frontex has been in the spotlight several times. Faced with evidence of abuses, the Director General, Fabrice Leggeri, resigned, and, recently, the European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf) released a report certifying that Frontex covered up serious human rights violations at the European borders (ITA; ENG). In this context, many students and academics at the University of Turin have taken the issue to heart and have continued to press for DIST and the Politecnico to take a clear position and terminate this collaboration. Frontex is involved in systemic violence against asylum seekers trying to cross European borders: there can be no collaboration with such an entity.
The Board of Directors of the other major Athenaeum in Turin, the University of Turin, also came to this conclusion. Since DIST is an 'inter-university' department (i.e. located, formally, between the Politecnico and the University), the University has now finally decided to take a clear contrary stance to the work that DIST does with Frontex. The motion calls on DIST and the Polytechnic to terminate the agreement, immediately, without ifs and buts. This latest development is reported in a further article by Luca Rondi in Altreconomia, where I intervene to reiterate a very simple concept:
Rescinding the contract does not mean taking a step backwards with respect to the missions of an Athenaeum engaged in international contracts and research, but taking one forward. Rescinding the contract is an important signal consistent with an ethical vision of intellectual freedom that the university rightly prides itself on: freedom means being able to re-evaluate decisions taken and change direction if the context has changed. Now is the time to do so.
I don't have much hope my Department will do the right thing, but we will continue to fight to keep #Frontex out of our Universities.
Ash Amin's retirement party – My oral festschrift to him
Yesterday, 29th Sept 2022, I took part in the retirement party of my former first PhD supervisor and fundamental academic mentor, Ash Amin. The event was organised by Bhaskar Vira at the Department of Geography, the University of Cambridge, followed by an evening dinner at Emmanuel College.
Beyond an engaging conversation among Ash, Philip Howell, and Maan Barua, the day consisted of a series of 'oral testimonies' and celebrations of Ash's thinking and doing, carried through by four of his former students. I shared the task with the excellent Tatiana Theme, Lisa Richaud and Maria Hagan.
I owe a lot to Ash. His intellectual curiosity and his care for my persona were fundamental to the development of my own thinking and love for academic work. Below you can read my oral festschrift to him, which I hope summarise well my sentiment toward Ash the person, and Ash the scholar. At the end of the text, some pictures of the event, taken by Stephen Ajadi (shared with permission).
The framework of the encounter
Michele Lancione, for Ash Amin
Thank you for having me here today. It is a great honour to be part of this afternoon for and with Professor Ash Amin. I am honoured to be here because it means that in joining celebration, I have also – at least a little – been part of the journey. I am talking about the journey of an individual who has constantly questioned the grounds he has contributed to establishing, the journey of a scholar that has shown, at every turn, genuine conceptual and political curiosity: Ash as a being thirst for ideas, for well written and engaging arguments, for ways of thinking beyond the canon. This day allows me to thank Ash for a unique gift he gave me and many others: I am referring to the reverberance of his intellectual desire, a vibrance that at times accelerated as an impatience, a power inviting who encounters it to question and to push; to read more and to read better; to write with consideration; to treat intellectual labour with care.
The privilege of having encountered Ash's intellectual affection renders being here at the same time beautiful and tricky. I want to be honest: I have struggled to put this short text together. And this is not because I don't know what to say about Ash's scholarship – but it is because, ultimately, I am not sure I want to say, I am not sure I want to be part of the ritual marking the process of retirement.
I started writing these lines few weeks ago. In my spare time, I went back to some of the early writings of Ash, which included, among the known text on economic and regional geography, a rich report – typed in Italian – on the 'Stella' neighbourhood in Naples. Then I re-read his foundational works on placing globalisation, regional inequalities, and the quest to argue for a new politics of place (what Doreen Massey called a 'progressive sense of place'). I then switched to the writings on ethnicity, race, and encounters, and continued with the book through which I first encountered his thinking – back in 2006, reading for my Master's degree the Italian translation of Cities, Re-imagining the Urban, coauthored with Nigel Thrift. After that, I dwelt again in the pages of my favourite book of his, Land of Strangers; then I flipped, this time faster, through the pages of my least favourite book of his, Arts of the Political (Nigel will pardon me, I hope). This journey was concluded by re-appreciating his most recent works on the notion of animated space, his papers on migrant mental health in Shanghai with Lisa Richaud, and by re-reading the introduction to the book we recently co-edited together for Duke – another of his gifts to me.
In re-approaching these texts, I was moved by the idea of providing to you today a concise overview of how these separate bodies of work are 'one'; to give you a hint of how, at least in my reading, they are all grounded in a profound desire – a power – to articulate a politics for the just city – a project that for Ash entails questioning and re-approaching each of these terms anew. City, as a mechanosphere of human and non-human that has an act of its own, a life trespassing the rationale of policy, an intelligence of intelligences made of computations but also of affects, of atmospheres as much as of cement, of intentionalities and violent extractions, as much as of di-vidual, only partially and momentarily coherent, assemblage of volitions, metabolic and ecologic impulses, matter and discourse. Just, as a question of what kind of justice and for whom, when so clearly the language of rights has failed to provide the mean for struggles, since fewer and fewer institutions are enabled to capacitate and to defend capacitation, and more and more 'rights' become signifier to be appropriated by extractive practices and enduring racial dispossession. Politics, read by Ash at the intersection of urbanity and justice, both as a project to be carried through and an agent of action – a proposition that, for Ash, has to deal with economic, ecological and social structures but requires attention to how these are a matter of multiple agencies (human, non-human, infrastructural, atmospheric) providing much social flesh – disempowering but also affirmative social flesh – to work with.
My intention today was to tell you how much Ash's quest for a politics for the just city affected my intellectual journey and to point out how his writings – sometimes appearing perhaps disparate and concerned with too much – are instead held together by a profound commitment to social justice with a precise orientation. The project is to unpack the social beyond the pastiche of canonical sociological thinking while simultaneously maintaining a commitment to crafting socio-geographical imaginaries and methods that might be useful, directly appropriated, and put into action. But the more I have tried to write such a text, the more I confronted myself with the meaning of this exercise – the performative act of marking retirement, as I said earlier.
And so I scrapped what I had written, I trashed the ideas and the notes, and I instead wrote a text message to my dear sister Tatiana Thieme and, through a short exchange with her, I got the confidence to say what I really what to say; to affirm what I think today should be all about. My dear audience, that is simple. Today is just an illusion. You, all of you, called out of your busy academic and non-academic lives, you who have taken time off to come into this room to 'celebrate' and to 'perform', you, my friend, are no more and no less guests of an illusion, because today, I hope the might Cambridge University won't mind, today, we are retiring no one today. Because if I may accept the fact that, after today, Ash will have more time than ever to chop his fingers in his beautiful garden, I shall not accept the option of retiring the energy of which I spoke, the intellectual burst with which he faces you every time you talk to him, as well as that questioning look of his, which makes immediately apparent to you when you haven't done enough work, but also those same eyes running places in those rare occasions in which you might have said something he hasn't already thought of.
No retirement today, no festivities, everybody goes home. Without please, and without excuses. We are just asking Ash to perform again and again because love for intellectual labour is so much needed today more than ever – at times in which your sad country is so clearly detaching itself from its ground and will sooner or later entirely collapse, while mine dances the swing of nationalism and fear once again, and the affect of militarisation wraps all of us together, like a cloth tight on our necks and eyes – tighter for some than others, but increasingly suffocating for the many. It is a violent image; I am conscious of that. A violent image to render the fierce powers of international financial capitalism, authoritarian pursuits, war industries and reactionary tunes, turning our dwelling on planet earth as real and felt, genuine dystopian, Land of Strangers. What is needed to cut through such a violent cloth is a multiplicity of grassroots political struggles – but the latter, to be imagined, require the labour of intellectual unrest – a labour that to speak truth to power needs to be fulfilled by a desire not to be satisfied, by any explanation, ever. To teach of this thirst in our classrooms, to write on such emancipatory affect in our papers and books, to be constantly unsatisfied and to be recharged through that — this is what Ash's works speak of; this is what he has taught me with his silences, his nods, his sometime incomprehensible fabulations, and this is what today we are not going to retire.
I remember well the first time I arrived in the UK. It was September 2008, and I was due to commence my PhD at Durham. I landed at Heathrow, which was my first time in the country. When there, I passed through the usual duty-free shops, waiting for my connecting flight to Newcastle. To have the chance to relate to what follows, you have to know that I grew up in a tiny rural village in the North West of Italy, in a working-class family. My father, now retired, was a factory worker at FIAT, and my mother a cleaner. Becoming an academic was not in the plan, and neither was, to be honest, completing the entire cycle at Uni. I benefited from the scholarships offered by the Italian Public Education system, and from the fact that Italy is filled with Pizzerias where a waiter is always well accepted. I kept doing multiple jobs up to the end of my PhD, and it is only thanks to Ash's and my former MA supervisor Francesca's efforts to mobilise funding that I was able to carry the PhD through completion. But this is not what I want to focus on.
The point is that when I was waiting in Heathrow for my connecting flight to reach Ash at Durham University, I ended up buying two things. Well, I proudly and decisively bought two things. The first was a Paul Smith's wallet. The second was a Paul Smith keychain. Of course, these were unnecessary and foolish purchases. Of course, in buying those two things, I wasted the money I had saved for many weeks of subsistence (Tesco baked potatoes and beans came to help). And, of course, luxury is evil and should be banished. But also, and at the same time, seeing from the eyes of that working-class kid with totally broken English and zero ideas about his new life, those in the Heathrow candy shop were the only possible purchases. Those purchases were a way for that kid to tell himself that things were going to be different. It's easy, now, for me and all of us to laugh at that – and to see how problematic that was. And yet, it happened, and those two things are still with me to date, 14 years after my first landing in the country.
I thought that the keychain was the right gift for you, Ash, which is why – while I am still holding onto my wallet – I am giving it to you today. For keys are the object of home, and homing, homelessness, dwelling, inhabiting, and belonging are at the core of our shared interests. But partially, also, because you gave me keys, real ones, when you pushed me to read all those books, when you asked me to write all those essays in the first year of my PhD, and then, after, when you invited me to go back at the drawing board when things did not make sense and, most importantly, to go back there when they made too much sense. The keys you gave me will stay with me for more than 14 years. And so, to celebrate your non-retirement, for all the openings that you will offer to scholars of the future, through your direct engagement and your writing, here is my small symbolic gift for you: a warn, silly Paul Smith keychain figuring a colourful Mini car. Because sometimes the affective, as the political, can be carried through the most insignificant details.
Years of struggle ahead
Now we are going to watch her – and I ask for all of you, to please watch us.
There are going to be years of struggles ahead – around #gender and #sexuality rights, #migration and #asylum, #class, #poverty & more.
Let's stay alert, everyone #ItalianElection.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/25/italy-elections-exit-polls-point-to-victory-for-coalition-led-by-far-right-giorgia-meloni
Speaking of Frontex, Militarization and Universities at a public meeting in Turin (Volere la Luna)
On Saturday, 24th September, 9pm, I will join a critical public festival in Turin, sponsored by 'Volere la Luna'.
At the event, I will join a number of activists and colleagues to discuss around the increased role that the militarization industry is having in Turin, the city where I live. I will speak of the relationship between my University, the Polytechnic, and that industry – focusing in particular on the Frontex case, on bordering, and on the relationship between research and the military.
Free entry, in Via Trivero 16 at 9pm. Check the poster below for the full extent of the Festival.
Locandina 2022 def
Interview on radical housing and urbanity with WOZ (Swiss-German critical left newspaper)
I am grateful to the WOZ (DieWochenzeitung) and to Raphael Albisser for giving me space on their pages to express some ideas on urbanity, radical housing struggles and the meaning of academic work.
You can find the interview, in German, here: https://www.woz.ch/-c857
Below I am providing an un-edited automatic English translation of the piece.
Credit for the photo of the actual copy of the magazine above: David Kaufmann
AUTOMATIC ENGLISH TRANSLATION
"When it comes to housing, it quickly becomes existential".
When people in the world's urban centres resist displacement, they are fighting for much more than a roof over their heads. Understanding the radical quality of their resistance also requires radical research, says Turin geography professor Michele Lancione.
"I'm interested in cities where struggles for housing coincide with other problems," says Michele Lancione: a woman dyes laundry in the polluted Makoko lagoon in Lagos, Nigeria.
Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba, AFP
WOZ: Mr Lancione, where is the future of a city decided?
Michele Lancione: That's not an easy question. And the first answer that comes to mind is: probably in a bank here in Switzerland.
No, of course that's far too simplistic. I am not a Swiss expert at all. But the country is one of the most important locations worldwide in terms of financialisation, i.e. the transfer of capital into financial products, which in turn plays a central role in the development of cities and what we think of as urbanity.
How exactly?
Urban development and thus the further development of infrastructure just like housing do not only need capital. They are also designed for capital. They are designed to make even more money out of financial investments. The city is the place where this takes on a particularly concrete form, in infrastructure projects and a real estate economy that promises profits through mortgages and rents.
At the same time, the future of the city is also being decided from below, for example through processes of internal and transnational migration, which have brought about huge changes in the last forty years, especially for cities in the so-called Global South. Today, climate change also plays an important role, let's think of the Indonesian capital Jakarta for example: parts of the city are subsiding by about 25 centimetres per year, flooding is increasing. This causes problems that are not decided in the context of financialisation – but in the experienced reality of the people who are forced to relocate. So the city is shaped as much by global economic interests as by the reality of the urban, the experienced struggle for housing. And there is a third level in between.
Politics?
Certainly, but I mean mainly a cultural understanding of a global political class that cities should look a certain way and function in a certain way. These three levels together result in the direction in which cities develop.
In your research, you have long been dealing with urban struggles over housing, with forced evictions and resistance to them. You describe this with the term "radical housing". Where does it come from?
I don't know exactly, to be honest. You can find it in pamphlets from housing movements in the UK in the seventies. As I understand it, and as my colleagues understand it, the radicalism that we use it to describe occurs particularly when movements are fighting the larger and broader issues that underlie housing in the first place. This can refer to economic mechanisms and profiteering, but also to completely different aspects.
Which ones, for example?
Sometimes it's about climate justice, sometimes it's about fighting racism or patriarchy. Most of my research so far has been done in Romania, especially in Bucharest. There I studied how people – especially Roma – fight for their right to housing. People, for example, who are evicted from their flats in the city centre. My focus was always on the struggle for the right to housing, but I found that it was about much more: it was a struggle of marginalised communities against racist dispossession. My new research project is now about examining in a number of cities around the world the social struggles with which the one over housing is interwoven.
The project started in September and is funded by the EU until 2025. What is the research goal?
We are trying to understand what people and communities are essentially trying to achieve when they struggle for a place to live in their city – sometimes without expressing it in language that is immediately accessible to us. We are investigating this in a number of cities in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. As a global research project, however, we try to avoid an overarching theory.
That would be problematic. We are dealing with geographically and also historically very specific contexts with different forms of political expression, which are not immediately understood in our very westernised academic world. It is therefore crucial that the researchers in this project are familiar with the relevant contexts and the forms of structural violence that operate there. The kind of knowledge that should come out of this project should not be: We have here overarching knowledge that can be derived from the housing struggles from Lagos to Mexico City. No, we want to provide a set of specifically locatable insights to enrich our collective knowledge of what the global struggle for housing actually is.
So you're not creating a synthesised theory, but rather a kind of mosaic?
Yes, and I can explain why. Essentially, we want to create a decolonised scientific framework. Because the way the political in the struggle for housing has mostly been described so far stems from a Eurocentric tradition. It is perfectly fine to understand squatting in Italy as an essential practice of housing politics; but when people squat houses in Johannesburg, it probably takes a different form of expression than in Turin. One that has been hijacked in the past by certain narratives: humanitarian narratives, for example, that are about the resilience and adaptability of urban dwellers – and not about political practices. This is problematic because these narratives and this language come from the colonial centres. But sometimes the political is not just about organising or mobilising, but about multiple, nuanced forms of resistance that cannot be generalised – hence the mosaic approach.
Was it difficult to get public research funding with this approach?
I'll be honest here: To a certain extent, you just have to play the game. The European Research Council (ERC), which is now funding my project, has a very neoliberal language. Then you have to say something like: this is a new paradigm of science, it's groundbreaking. To get research funding, you also need a certain track record. It's about how much and where you've already published – an exclusionary way of defining scientific excellence. But that's how it works, and for better or worse, I fit into their scheme. At least the upside is that the ERC isn't constantly breathing down your neck when funding is spoken for.
So as a professor you are a kind of door opener?
If you successfully apply for the research funds, you can hire the researchers yourself. When I got the grant, I was still at the University of Sheffield, but then had to return to Turin for family reasons. At the Polytechnic, I practically started the project all over again. And I found out: The research environment there is far less diverse than that in the UK. All around me were Italians, all white. One of the central prerequisites of the project is that people work in it who already know the respective contexts very well. So I hired people from Nigeria and Brazil. And it was a nightmare.
I spent a lot of time on bureaucracy. The system is simply not ready to hire international researchers. Mistakes were made with all the visas. It was a painful process to build this team of people with seven nationalities. Yet it was the only way to do this kind of work: I don't want to send someone to Mumbai who was doing research on the real estate market in Rome yesterday. Because that would simply be reproducing what the vast majority of social sciences have always done.
How did you choose the cities?
I am interested in cities where struggles for housing obviously coincide with other problems. In Lagos, for example, there are two levels: First, financialisation is clearly a displacement driver; Lagos is the fastest growing city in Africa in terms of population and economy. Secondly, environmental and climatic factors play a role. Because most of the displacement is in the waterfront areas of the city.
You say that you are concerned with intersectionality, that is, with intersections of social struggles. Does housing have a prominent role in this?
I think so. After all, it is a place where we find our existential security as human beings. For me, whose interest is in cities and how people inhabit the world, housing is where an incredible number of things come together: Sexism, queerphobia, racism. Issues of how housing is granted or taken away from people. Economic issues. And it's pretty obvious by now that the struggle for housing has become a global struggle.
Why now of all times?
Maybe it's a bit oversimplified, but I think there are two reasons: first, the stark demographic reality. The world population has grown exponentially over the last fifty years. This inevitably brings with it questions about housing and infrastructure. Secondly, it is about the space in which capital has decided to multiply.
Where else? The lemon has been squeezed in many respects.
Exactly. And in actually every city – from Zurich to London and Belo Horizonte to Hong Kong – the primary need for housing has become the decisive growth factor. What this can mean was seen in Spain, for example, when the real estate bubble burst in 2008.
At the same time, it makes the functioning of capitalism very directly tangible for people from the most diverse backgrounds. It is all the more interesting that local and national authorities as well as international organisations and the UN are still dealing with this as if it were a simple local political issue. As if the problems could be solved with technical solutions. I have not investigated this further, but I suspect that this is being done deliberately. Because it is only by negotiating the right to decent housing in this way that capital can continue to do whatever – please excuse the language – shit it wants in urban centres.
Where does your passion for urbanity actually come from?
I grew up in the country, in a village eighty kilometres north of Turin. When I was eighteen, I moved to the city, a fairly small city, but a city nonetheless. In Turin, I started to get interested in questions around the urban. And of course I was also influenced by what I saw during my studies; there was an incredible amount written about urbanity back then.
Is it common to work with the concept of radicality in the academic world?
My colleagues and I use it to refer to militant communities that worked with the term "radical housing" because it was politically obvious. When it comes to housing, it quickly becomes existential and radical action becomes necessary. In science, my main concern is that knowledge must also be radical.
How is that to be understood?
It's about the question of how you produce knowledge. About the decisions you make in the scientific context. It may sound silly that I have spent a year of my academic life hiring researchers who come from the context of their research. But it is a conceptual radicalism that is central in my eyes. It could make it possible to create a different kind of knowledge.
Or another example: six years ago we founded the "Radical Housing Journal", in which we publish articles according to all scientific standards, but without letting ourselves be taken over by one of the big publishing houses. They take publicly funded academic work, privatise it and sell it back to the universities. Others even pay academics to publish with them.
They now call themselves "activist academics". I guess that's easier once you have a full professorship. Did you have to become more conformist on the way there?
If you publish well in the Anglo-Saxon system, you can have a fast career. I got my doctorate in 2012, and my first open ended contract as Associate Professor just four years later. And the reason was that I knew how to play the neoliberal game in the academic business. I am not ashamed to say that. Me and my partner, who is a filmmaker, were also very mobile; we lived in ten cities in three countries on two continents in less than eight years.
Where did you become an activist?
I was not yet a professor at the time, I was doing research in Bucharest as part of a post-doctoral position. I already knew the city very well and started to get involved with the Roma communities there – and that's when the political caught up with me. I got to know feminist, anarchist, queer activist collectives – all personal matters close to my heart. And I had to learn to navigate the tensions between research and activism.
First, you have to be careful. It may be hip right now to call yourself an activist:n researcher: but there is a certain self-interest in the relationship. That's why you should separate these two worlds quite strongly, because traditionally academics have always been very extractive towards activists, using them for their own purposes.
There is the same problem in journalism. What is your solution?
You must always be vigilant about your role – otherwise you risk exploiting activists for academic gain. Therefore, when I enter activist spaces, I either do it as an individual, as an activist; or I do it as an academic and in return I try to let resources flow from the academic enterprise into the activist struggles. When I call myself an activist researcher, it also refers, above all, to a critical attitude towards my own institutions. Today, as a professor, I have the opportunity to do this.
This was demonstrated last year when you publicly opposed the fact that the Polytechnic of the University of Turin, where you are employed, cooperates with the European border protection agency Frontex. What happened there?
The Polytechnic won a public tender from Frontex and now my department, where many cartographers and geographers work, is supposed to produce maps for the agency. I heard about it at a departmental meeting, and since then I have tried to fight it.
Did you succeed?
No, nothing could be done about the cooperation with Frontex. The department's solution was to put a note in the contract stating that both parties are obliged to respect human rights. Which is of course complete rubbish, sorry. How can you ask Frontex to respect human rights? That's madness. But at least there was some movement within the department, some colleagues took my side. And by writing an open letter to the public, it was at least noticed that not everyone in the scientific community agreed. It was encouraging for some activists, as well as for students who are grappling with the issue.
And how did the colleagues react?
The matter has caused quite a stir in the media, and for many people I am a stain on their reputations because of it. That also shows that the academic world today is largely depoliticised. A world in which young people study to pick up a degree and then have good job prospects – a functional thing for neoliberalism.
But many in the academic profession hardly have the privilege to expose themselves without consequences because many work under precarious employment conditions.
Yes, that is true. The professorship allows me to fight back. I feel it is a responsibility. But I am not the only professor at the Polytechnic. Just one of the few who speak out critically. And unfortunately that's not only the case in Turin or Italy, many professors today are technocrats.
But there are always those who speak out clearly on political issues …
It is one thing to take a public stand, for example to co-sign an open letter, to get involved in debates. And that is also good! But it's something else again to speak out against the academic establishment. Even if you have a full professorship, it's not easy, because it can isolate you. I myself am on the safe side at the moment, I have my research project and my team. But what about 2025, when that ends? I wouldn't suffer, but it would be difficult to work in an environment where I am spurned.
So should students in particular politicise the universities again?
That would probably be most effective. After all, we academics are mostly quite self-centred, we want to be liked. So if students build up pressure and start challenging their professors, they might hit a nerve. But I know from my own experience that you can't expect that from students easily: I come from a working-class family, my father was a factory worker at Fiat, my mother a cleaner. When I arrived at the university, I first reverently accepted all hierarchies there. It is important for students to gain dominion over their own thinking and base the political on it.
Michele Lancione (38) is a professor at the Turin Polytechnic. He teaches at the Department of Economic and Political Geography of the Department of Territorial Studies and Planning. He is also Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Sheffield.
In his current EU-funded research project, Inhabiting Radical Housing, Lancione and a team of international scholars are investigating radical struggles over housing in a number of cities around the world. Lancione is co-founder and editor of the academic Radical Housing Journal and a member of the grassroots movement Common Front for Housing Rights in the Romanian capital Bucharest.
Update on the Polytechnic – Frontex case
Following the ongoing investigative work of Luca Rondi at Altra Economia (ITA – ENG) I am writing again – this time not alone, but with my colleague Francesca Governa – to the regents of the Polytechnic to ask for clarity on the Polito – Frontex agreement.
Below it's the translation of our letter. Note that I am still waiting for a reply to the previous email, dated 18 March 2022.
Previous updates: this, this, and the original post.
Dear Rector, Dear Pro-Rector
Dear Director and Vice-Directors of the Dist
Dear Fellow Representatives of Full Professors in the Academic Senate
L'altra economia published an article (https://altreconomia.it/frontex-polito-ecco-le-prime-mappe-e-la-clausola-sui-diritti-umani-non-vincola-lagenzia/) on 7 June that returns to the issue of the contract between Frontex and the Politecnico di Torino. We learn from the article that the "binding clause" linked to the observance of "respect for human and fundamental rights of persons" by both the "researchers" and the "principal" within the "Frontex OP/403/2020/DT" agreement, decided at the Senate meeting of 14 December 2021, does not involve the Agency. The consortium agreement thus seems to be deficient precisely because of the lack of agreement on the part of an entity – Frontex – that has been repeatedly accused of violating the human and fundamental rights of persons. It seems to us that this lack conflicts with the fundamental contents of the programme manifesto on the 'Integrity of Research at the Politecnico di Torino' and the Code of Ethics of our University, as well as disregarding the decision of the Academic Senate.
We believe that it is important for the Politecnico, in compliance with its institutional mandate, its autonomy as a centre of excellence for higher education and research, and as a place of reflection and debate open to the territory and society, to clarify the situation regarding the Consortium agreement by requesting that it also involve the offices of the Frontex Agency.
Please also note that no reply was ever sent to the email sent on 18 March 2022, containing a similar request for clarification.
Michele Lancione and Francesca Governa
Public debate on radical housing in Zurich – 11th May
Last night I had a wonderful time at Urban Publics Zurich event, where we discussed radical housing theory and praxis with organisers and scholars based in Zurich.
I was on the stage with Philipp Klaus from Inura, Antonia Steger from Urban Equipe, Philippe Koch from ZHAW. The whole thing was masterfully organised and modered by Hanna Hilbrant.
These kinds of engagements are not easy to pull together. They require lots of care in their making – partially because of the extractive traditions of academia vs activist spaces and partially because lexicons of 'radicality' are not easily shared across geographies. Nonetheless, yesterday I think we had a very productive and enriching night. Kudos to my Zurich comrades and colleagues!
Launching "Beyond Inhabitation: A Collective Study Lab"
Today, after a year of preparation, we are launching our "Beyond Inhabitation: A Collective Study Lab" based at DIST in Turin, Italy.
This is our beautiful website: https://beyondinhabitation.org
Through the Lab, we aim to provide an infrastructure to investigate how inhabitation is re-worked from the ground across geographies in everyday life endurances that can morph, often silently, into struggles against contemporary and historical forms of dispossession. Activities will include collective study and writing; an international seminar series; extended working groups; and a program of activists and scholars in residence.
The Lab is co-directed by Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone, and its core team comprises nine Post-doctoral Research Fellows based in Turin. It also features an outstanding international Steering Committee, made up of 10 leading scholars of our time and a group of Turin Associates based at our hosting department (DIST).
Much work of love and joy has gone into preparing this Lab and its future activities. Please browse our website to know more about us, and follow us on Twitter to keep posted about our forthcoming events and opportunities. You can also subscribe to our blog to receive updates, here: https://beyondinhabitation.org/blog/
If you'd like to get in touch, please drop us a line at info@beyondinhabitation.org. We look forward to hearing from you.
Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone, for The Beyond Inhabitation Lab's Team
The Lab is hosted at DIST, Polytechnic of Turin
Supported by ERC grant n. 851940 (PI: Lancione)
Joining dock workers in Genova for a public talk and demonstration against the war industries
If you are in Genoa this Thursday 31st March, I will be at a demonstration and public debate with the comrades of the Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali thanks to a very kind invitation from them.
The comrades of CALP have been striking for years to stop, among others, the Saudi ships that pass through the port of Genoa to bring weapons to Yemen. Some of them, for their anti-fascism and for their anti-militarism have also been prosecuted, as criminals, by the local judiciary.
I will bring my solidarity, and talk about Fortress Europe, Frontex, armaments and the role of Universities in these industries of death.