Abstract

Mayor Domenico Lucano of Riace, Italy will join the Cambridge Migration Society for a discussion of his experience hosting refugees in his city. Dr Anna Bagnoli (Sociology, University of Cambridge) will moderate the discussion.

In 2016, Mayor Lucano was named one of Fortune’s “World’s Greatest Leaders”: “For decades emigration drained life from Riace, a village of 2,000 on the Calabrian coast. When a boatload of Kurdish refugees reached its shores in 1998, Lucano, then a schoolteacher, saw an opportunity. He offered them Riace’s abandoned apartments along with job training. Eighteen years on, Mayor Lucano is hailed for saving the town, whose population now includes migrants from 20-some nations, and rejuvenating its economy. (Riace has hosted more than 6,000 asylum seekers in all.) Though his pro-refugee stance has pitted him against the mafia and the state, Lucano’s model is being studied and adopted as Europe’s refugee crisis crests.”

Further background on the “Riace Model”: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/2016/04/refugee-settlement-programs-save-dying-italian-villages-160421113908416.html

About Dr Bagnoli: Anna is Associate Researcher at the Department of Sociology, where she contributes to postgraduate teaching of qualitative research methods and to postgraduate supervision. After research posts at the National Research Council in Rome and at the LSE , she carried out her PhD at the Centre for Family Research of the University of Cambridge. Her research covers the areas of youth studies, identities, migration, and gender. Anna’s current work looks at the identity processes of migrants, with a focus on the internal migrations of Europeans, particularly young Italians.