The ERC SOLROUTES project invites contributions to its 2025 Intermediate Conference with a view to critically rethinking the multifaceted nexus between solidarity and unauthorized migration. This discussion will take place along three interrelated analytical axes: emic languages and naming, gendered solidarities, and (counter)infrastructural processes enacting freedom of movement.In recent decades, academic research on migration has increasingly moved beyond methodological nationalism.

Argument

The ERC SOLROUTES project invites contributions to its 2025 Intermediate Conference with a view to critically rethinking the multifaceted nexus between solidarity and unauthorized migration. This discussion will take place along three interrelated analytical axes: emic languages and naming, gendered solidarities, and (counter)infrastructural processes enacting freedom of movement.In recent decades, academic research on migration has increasingly moved beyond methodological nationalism. Within this shift, solidarity has emerged as both a normative ideal and an empirical object, animated by various actors – namely, migrants, activists, kinship networks, grassroots movements, and NGOs – operating across different terrains, sites and scales. However, solidarity is far from a stable or universal category; rather, it is a contested and dynamic field of social action and meaning, deeply embedded in languages, gendered social relations, and cultural, social, and material infrastructures. We suggested to conceive solidarity through the lens of a materialistic approach: during almost two years of ethnographic fieldwork across North and Western Africa, the Balkans and Mediterranean areas, SOLROUTES researchers have tried to explore how solidarity as a circulating energy opens routes and de-bordering opportunities, facing harshening constraints of border policies and technologies.The present conference has been convened in response to the necessity for a plural and situated theorisation of solidarity, grounded in the lived experiences of those who inhabit, resist, and navigate migration routes. Furthermore, the aim is to present intermediate outcomes of the project entering in a theoretical and methodological conversation with colleagues and scholars working on similar topics.The Conference will be opened by Luca Queirolo Palmas (University of Genoa, SOLROUTES P.I.), and Federico Rahola (University of Genoa).

Contributors are invited to choose one of the following axes for their proposal:

Naming and Grounding Solidarity

The first thematic axis interrogates solidarity and routes' semantic and epistemological foundations. Rather than taking these concepts for granted as ethical universals, we call for analyses that explore the emic vocabularies, hidden transcripts, and discursive practices by which mobile subjects define their experiences, allies, risks, and modes of assistance. How do migrants themselves name the social relations and strategies that sustain their trajectories? What terms emerge across different cultural and linguistic contexts to describe collective agency and mobility? Inspired by Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblances” and Marcus’s travelling ethnographies, this axis encourages contributions that follow words, idioms, and naming practices as epistemic traces of solidarity in motion.

Gendering Solidarity

The second axis invites contributions that analyse and frame the relationship between migration, borders’ materiality and solidarity through a gendered lens. We particularly welcome papers investigating gendered solidarity networks and practices, and how gendered subjectivities – particularly those who identify as women – shape and are shaped by migration trajectories, as well as the transformative impact of migration on intimate relations, family structures, and caregiving practices.

Infrastructuring Solidarity

The third axis focuses on migration infrastructures and the politics of infrastructuring. Moving beyond a narrow understanding of infrastructure as material or institutional apparatus, we welcome papers focusing on a relational and processual approach that views infrastructures as battlegrounds where mobility and control, emancipation and exploitation, coexist and collide. Contributions may investigate how solidarity is embedded or confronts infrastructures at multiple scales: macro, meso, and micro. Special attention will be given to subaltern solidarities – informal networks initiated by migrants – and abolitionist solidarities, which oppose securitised migration management through radical infrastructural alternatives.

By intersecting these three reflection strands, the SOLROUTES 2025 Intermediate Conference aims to open a critical and interdisciplinary space for discussion and collective elaboration where naming practices, gendering experiences, and infrastructural arrangements are not merely objects of study but conceptual entry points to rethink the meaning, function, and politics of solidarity in contemporary border regimes.
We welcome contributions from scholars across various disciplines – including anthropology, sociology, geography, gender, migration and border studies, visual studies and arts – that are empirically grounded mainly but not only Global South fieldswork, and theoretically ambitious.
The conference particularly values approaches drawing on multi-sited ethnography, collaborative methods, and creative research formats that give voice to the situated knowledges of migrants.
As SOLROUTES project is grounded on arts and visualities as a way to engage in ethnography (https://solroutesexhibition.eu/), the 4 days conference will be crossed by films, photos exhibition, theatre interventions, comics’ presentations, music perfomances.

Submission guideline

Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words, outlining the chosen axis, title and main arguments of your contribution, and methodology. In addition, include a brief biographical note (max. 150 words) with your affiliation and relevant publications or research interests.

Please, send contributions to: solroutes@unige.it,

before July 30.

Submissions will be evaluated according to their relevance, clarity and originality.
Accepted contributions – for each panel - will be published in a collective volume during 2026.

Calendar

• Proposal submission: July 30.
• All proposals will be evaluated and receive feedback by September 1.
• Accepted contributors will be asked to provide a draft manuscript by November, 3.

Keynote-speakers

• Milena Belloni (University of Antwerp)
• Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna)
• William Walters (Carleton University)

Panel discussants

• Didem Daniş (Galatasaray University)
• Marjana Hamersak (University of Zagreb)
• Marco Martiniello (Université de Liege)
• Georgeta Stoica (Université de Mayotte)
• Joris Schapendonk (Rabdoud University)