Lorenzo Alunni |
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03.09.2018-27.09.2018
Healthcare at the Border: Managing Camps and Informal Settlements for Refugees and Migrants
Lorenzo Alunni received his doctorate degree from the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and the Università degli Studi di Perugia. He was also a Fernand Braudel postdoctoral fellow at the IRIS-Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. In 2017-2018 he taught Medical Anthropology at the University of Milan-Bicocca. In 2018-2020 he will be a IFRIS (Institute for Research and Innovation for Society) and CERMES3, Paris. After his doctoral and postdoctoral work on health issues of Roma groups in Italy, Lorenzo’s new research focuses on the healthcare actions conducted in migrant camps and smaller informal settlements located in different sites across European borders by governmental and non-governmental actors. His project will examine the articulation between the implementation of the right to health and the current EU and member states policies on migration and asylum. -
01.02.2018-27.02.2018
When Illness Disrupts Adoption: Lessons from Italian Cases.
Biomedical discourses and practices about adoption are an expression of its biological dimension. First of all, biology is negotiated through the selection of the country of origin by the adopting parents. In the field of adoption studies, biomedicine has been studied mostly as a way to frame notions of appropriate and inappropriate children and families. In this proposal, the focus is different: not on biomedicine as a tool to identify fitting families or countries of origin, but how post-adoption health disruption shapes the understanding of adoption and unveils new moralities and conceptions of citizenship and belonging.
The analysis of the links between adoption and biomedical issues will reveal how the understandings of biology and adoption mutually reinforce themselves in the framework of citizenship. This research project offers a new perspective on this topic by crossing the themes of adoption and health issues, at the intersection of critical Adoption studies and Medical anthropology, with all their interdisciplinary connections. The starting point of this proposal is that the process of family formation can be interrupted by the discovery of the impossibility to have biological children; this situation can lead to the decision of international adoption, and to undertake its long bureaucratic path. Once obtained the adoption of a child, an unexpected health issue can disrupt this process. This situation often leads to a dynamic of estrangement between the adopting families and the adoptee, and to a medicalized and racialized differentiation by the state institutions and others actors. As health disruption proves to be a revealing phenomenon of the deep nature of many crucial notions regulating the everyday life of our societies and states, including their politics of life, the original and innovative objective of this proposal is inquiring on the connection between this phenomenon and the discussion on citizenship and belonging in contemporary Italy and Europe. -
02.02.2015-30.04.2015
Roma in Rome: Healthcare and Citizenship
This project outlines a further elaboration of the arguments developed in my PhD dissertation and post-doc current activity in Medical Anthropology through related papers in international peer-reviewed journals and, most of all, the writing of a book (in Italian and/or French or English). The research at the centre of the book originated from the work for the PhD thesis entitled “Healing and eviction. An ethnography of sanitary interventions in the Roma camps of Rome”, hosted by the Università degli Studi di Perugia (Italy) and Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (France), in joint direction. I defended my work in 2012 in front of a French-Italian Commission. The theme is the sanitary intervention in the urban spaces called “campi nomadi”, where Roma communities live, in Rome. It presents ethnographic data obtained by following the daily activities of a mobile medical unit (called ‘sanitary camper’) whose main goal is to offer medical support in the Roma settlements. The medical encounter that takes place in these areas offers insights into the dynamics of the relations of the Roma people with the dominant society and with the ruling institutions. This research identified the elements that relate to the moral economy of the acts of medical intervention. It explored the biopolitical dimension related to the pacification of subjects constantly exposed to strict security policies and to rejection from local and national administration. I am currently doing the first part of this work thanks to the Fernand Braudel Fellowship (Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme) at the IRIS (Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux (Sciences sociales, Politique, Santé), part of the EHESS-Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. I also had the opportunity to develop my work in 2013 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where I was Assistant Researcher of Prof. Didier Fassin, one of the leading scholars in the field of Medical Anthropology and Global Health.