Research Seminar in Sociology of Law with Michelle von Dach

Stuckedness in the Lives of Migrants in Rome

An Ethnography of Everyday Navigation of an Existential Condition

This research examines the experiences of illegalisation and precarity among migrants in Rome, Italy. More precisely, I studied how migrants live an experience of "stuckedness," a form of liminality that is circularly structural to Italy and Europe's border regimes. Stuckedness is characterized by involuntary immobility (Carling 2002) both physically but also existentially, resulting in the impossibility of making long-term life plans. Rather than a temporary liminal stage or Sayad's (1999) "double absence," stuckedness is a mode of governing migration that slows people down, gets them stuck in place, time, and life for extended periods, sometimes indefinitely and often cyclically.

When I began my ethnographic fieldwork in 2022, Italy’s political situation transitioned with a new far-right government, ushering in a more authoritarian anti-migrant political climate that materialised with significant legislative changes. Through 1.5 years of engaged ethnography in Rome, I gained access to the field in NGOs and grassroots solidarity organizations. This activist positionalities allowed me to build rapport with interlocutors, enabling in-depth participation in their social and intimate lives while attending to ethical implications.

In a first part I delineate stuckedness’s political-economic framework. Administrative bureaucracy creates loopholes where migrants become and re-become stuck, extending through criminalisation and externalization measures (Tuckett 2018; Griffiths et al. 2013). Forms of precarity intersect when waiting for residence permits, looking for a job with regular contract, and searching for housing are all entangled aspects where one depends on the others. Importantly, stuckedness is not static immobility but marked by urgency and hypermobility as migrants try to sort out their lives, prompting tactics to manage hopes and frustrations (Fontanari 2021).
The second half of my work explores domains of navigating stuckedness through forms of solidarity with grassroots associations and among migrants themselves. In the latter case, friendship networks emerge from shared stuckedness often transcending nationality.

Dr. Michelle von Dach is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Zurich. Her doctoral research project “Stuckedness in the Lives of Migrants in Rome. An Ethnography of Everyday Navigation of an Existential Condition” is based on long-term fieldwork in the Italian capital with migrant-led grassroots associations and civil society organisations, as well as with migrants that experienced irregolarisation in Italy. With a focus on lived experiences of precarity, uncertainty and temporal liminality, it introduces stuckedness as an analytical framework to understand a structural and cyclical migrant condition that suspends migrants in place, time and life, often indefinitely.