Infrastructures of Labour and Racialised Exclusion from the “Global” South to the “European” South. A conversation with Nabeela Ahmed and Emilia Melossi.
6 November, 3-4pm CET
This webinar brings into conversation two ethnographic inquiries into the racialised geographies of migrant labour in India and Southern Italy. Dr Nabeela Ahmed’s recent work on infrastructure as territorial stigma (IJURR, 2025) examines how internal labour migrants in Indian cities are spatially relegated through infrastructures that simultaneously enable mobility and reproduce exclusion, reinforcing caste, class, and gender hierarchies within India’s construction economy. Dr Emilia Melossi’s ethnography of Sub-Saharan agricultural workers in Puglia explores parallel processes of marginalisation in the “European South,” where racialised and informalised labour sustains intensive agri-food production under conditions of precarity, surveillance, and social invisibility. Together, the speakers reflect on how infrastructures, of housing, labour, and mobility, function as instruments of both exploitation and governance, embedding stigma into the material and spatial fabric of cities and rural frontiers alike.
Both studies highlight how infrastructures mediate belonging and exclusion, transforming migrants into indispensable yet disposable subjects of global capitalism. Through a comparative and postcolonial lens, the discussion connects South Asian and Sub-Saharan trajectories of labour migration and challenges normative paradigms of internal and international mobilities to explore the variegated ways in which racial capitalism and bordering practices shape contemporary forms of inequality while also giving rise to solidarities, collective agency, and everyday practices of endurance and resistance within stigmatized spaces.
The webinar is part of the online series “Diversity Matters” hosted by the Center for Migration and Societal Change of Eurac Research. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the webinar series explores the impact of migrations, diversities and mobilities on increasingly superdiverse territorial realities. The series is a forum for experts to share their work and expertise with an audience of fellow academics, students, decision-makers and practitioners.