Environmental Harm at the Border: The Case of Lampedusa

This event took place on the 28th January 2022. The University of Edinburgh Criminology Reading Group Seminar Series 2021/2022 presents: "Environmental Harm at the Border: The Case of Lampedusa" Dr Francesca Soliman, Edinburgh Napier University The Mediterranean island of Lampedusa has long been a transit point for sea-crossers travelling from the coast of North Africa into Italy. Far from being an accident of geography, Lampedusa’s role within Mediterranean migration has been shaped by the ever-increasing securitisation of the European Union’s external border, which designates peripheral islands as ideal places for the containment and identification of irregular migrants. While the socially harmful consequences of these processes of “borderisation” attract increasing scholarly attention, their environmental impact has so far remained unexplored. This presentation draws on findings from an ethnographic study of Lampedusa to explore some of the environmental harms linked to the island’s borderisation, their complex structural causes, and the conceptual challenge they represent for both green criminology and zemiology. Dr Francesca Soliman joined Edinburgh Napier University as lecturer in criminology in 2021, shortly after submitting her PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh. Francesca’s research examines the social harms linked to processes of borderisation, with a particular focus on the impact of border performance on remote island communities at the external...