Grassroots Solidarity for Refugees in Hostile Grounds: Spatial Practices of Bottom-Up Inclusion in Verona

Abstract

The article aims to shed light on everyday bottom-up practices of local solidarity groups in a predominantly exclusionary and nativist context. Considered as one of the most hostile settings in the Italian peninsula, with an elevated presence of far-right and populist right actors, the city of Verona offers an interesting case as con-comitantly the capital of migration of the Veneto region. Against the elevated presence of an ethnonationalist outlook to urban membership, a local network of grassroots actors challenges exclusionary practices in solidarity with newcomers from various legal statuses and backgrounds. These grassroots actors sharing the memory of collective struggles collaborate to overcome both social hostility and limitations of the institutional reception system in their own hometown. Premised on 3 years of fieldwork, the analysis draws from personal testimonies alongside visual narratives and archival research in offering a multidimensional historical investigation of everyday solidarities in an unlikely setting.