Research
I study precarious migration and its representation across a range of media. Situated in critical refugee studies, this interdisciplinary work links topics related to global migration, media, and transnational Italy. This work, which has been recognized with ACLS and NEH grants, uses the methods of ethnography, oral history, and media and narrative analysis to consider how border crossing is entangled with histories of violence and conquest, bordering, and racial capitalism, as well as practices of solidarity and abolitionist politics.
My research focuses especially on Africa-Europe mobilities and questions of asylum, migrant reception, human rights, and racial justice in Italy. In this work, I aim to shape understandings of the relationship between mobility, sovereignty, memory, rights, and belonging in and beyond the Mediterranean.
My published work has covered topics including migrant reception and crisis racism in Italy, the politics of rescue, refugee filmmaking and life writing, deterrence media, and comparative work across Mediterranean and North American border zones. I've also talked about these issues in public-facing outlets and via the podcast Migrations: A World on the Move. My book Emergency in Transit, about emergency responses to migration in Italy, comes out in November 2024. I’m currently at work on a project called Up/Rooted about farmworkers, migration, refugeeness, and connections to land.
Emergency in Transit
My book, Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present, responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north, focusing on the discourses and experiences of “emergency” that shape contemporary Mediterranean migration to the EU. I turn to testimonial narratives, analyzing oral history interviews I conducted with migrants and aid workers in Italy, together with a range of visual and narrative texts that portray transit to Europe and within Italy.
Recognizing emergency not as a singular event but as an apparatus that operates continually, this book challenges the colonial logics that posit the movements and presence of Africans in Europe as inherent crises.
Emergency in Transit is out with the University of California Press, in their Critical Refugee Studies Series, in both paperback and open access versions. Please be in touch if you're teaching or working with the book and would like to arrange a class visit or research talk.
Reviews
“This excellent book, while focused on the oppressive tentacles of what Eleanor Paynter calls the 'emergency apparatus,' navigates its way through the at times haunting accounts of survivors of the Mediterranean crossings, the forms of protest crafted in elegy to its victims, and the many literary and other artistic productions that document a rich and vibrant emergent cultural world often all but silenced in popular discourse. Paynter unearths the many symbols and tokens of a transformation of Italian society that many struggle to ignore: the fragments of shipwrecks, the ubiquitous detention centers, and the national commemoration of the loss of victims at sea that all signal a society caught in its own web of forgetting."
—Donald Martin Carter, author of Navigating the African Diaspora: The Anthropology of Invisibility
"Exploring the multiple dimensions of danger that compose the transit of migrants to and in Italy, Paynter lays bare the workings of an emergency apparatus that perpetuates itself. But this passionate and timely book does something more than that. Mining memories and testimonies, it illuminates possibilities for a different future."
—Sandro Mezzadra, coauthor of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (with Brett Neilson)
"Emergency in Transit brilliantly shows how emergency, as both a logic and an operation, ushers in a new age in Italy wherein virulent and violent forms of racism are given space to play out. This beautifully written book also holds space for the voices, texts, films, and sounds that serve as witness and testimony to this pernicious age. In so doing, Paynter expands the possibilities of agency for the many who are caught up in the churn of the emergency apparatus of migration."
—Stephanie Malia Hom, University of California, Santa Barbara
Featured in…
“Challenging Ideas of Crisis at International Borders” World in Focus with Cornell’s Einaudi Center for International Studies
“New Book Challenges the ‘Migration Crisis’ Narrative,” in the University of Oregon’s College of Arts and Sciences News
Journal articles and book chapters
Migration Imaginaries: Wreckage, Ruination, and Recovery, in Wendy S. Hesford, Momar K. Ndiaye, and Amy Shuman (eds), Human Rights on the Move, OSU Press, pp. 27-44, 2024
Choreographing Mobility and Human Rights: A Conversation with Momar Ndiaye, Eleanor Paynter, and Amy Shuman, in Human Rights on the Move, pp. 45-55, 2024
Creating Crises: Risk, Racialization, and the Migration-Security Nexus in Italy and the US, in Lauren Braun-Strumfels, Maddalena Marinari and Daniele Fiorentino (eds), Managing Migration in Italy and the United States, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, pp. 55-76, 2024
Performing Border Externalisation: Media Deterrence Campaigns and Neoliberal Belonging, co-authored with Sara Riva, Geopolitics, vol. 29, issue 4, pp. 1272-1296, 2024
Italy: Post-1990 Policies and Trends at Europe’s Southern Border, co-authored with Francesca Soliman, in Ana Vila-Freyer and Ibrahim Sirkeci (eds), Global Atlas of Refugees and Asylum Seekers, Migration Series, vol. 45, Transnational Press London, pp. 159-173, 2023
Gendered Asylum in the Black Mediterranean: Two Nigerian Women’s Experiences of Reception in Italy, in R. Zapata-Barrero and I. Awad (eds), Migrations in the Mediterranean, IMISCOE Research Series, Springer, 2023
“OutLaw Yard”: Reading Traces of Displacement as Testimonial Inscription, co-authored with Katrina M. Powell, Migration and Society, vol. 6, n. 1, pp. 87-104, 2023
Testimony on the Move: Navigating the Borders of (In)visibility with Migrant-Led Soundwalks, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 37, n. 1, pp. 129-152, 2022
Writing against border imperialism: epistemologies of transit, Italian Studies in South Africa (special issue on Diversity, decolonization, and Italian studies), vol. 35, n. 1, pp. 92-96, 2022
Border Crises and Migrant Deservingness: How the Refugee/Economic Migrant Binary Racializes Asylum and Affects Migrants’ Navigation of Reception, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, vol. 20, n. 2, pp. 293-306, 2022
The Transits and Transactions of Migritude in Bay Mademba's Il mio viaggio della speranza (My Voyage of Hope), the minnesota review, in "migritude folio", issue 94, pp. 104-123, 2020
The Liminal Lives of Europe’s Transit Migrants, Contexts: Understanding People in Their Social Worlds, vol. 17, n. 2, pp. 40-45, 2018
Autobiographical Docudrama as Testimony: Jonas Carpignano’s Mediterranea, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 32, n. 3, pp. 659-666, 2017
The Spaces of Citizenship: Mapping Personal and Colonial Histories in Contemporary Italy in Igiaba Scego’s La mia casa è dove sono (My Home is Where I Am), European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 6, pp. 135-153, 2017
Media Deterrence Campaigns: Border Externalisation and Neoliberal Belonging, co-authored with Sara Riva, Border Criminologies Blog, November 6, 2023
Beyond Numbers: Confronting Europe's Broken Border System, The Globe Post, May 30, 2023
‘I’m not a refugee, I’m a person’: Rethinking Power and Community in Humanitarian Contexts, co-authored with Giovanni Fontana and Dina Pasic of Second Tree, Routed Magazine, Creative Migration Policy issue, March 2023
A court case against migrant activists in Italy offers a reminder – not all refugees are welcome in Europe, The Conversation, May 13, 2022. Italian translation published in Internazionale, May 19, 2022
The U.K. wants to send refugees to Rwanda. That’s become a trend, co-authored with Christa Kuntzelman and Rachel Beatty Riedl for The Washington Post, April 20, 2022
Death on the Central Mediterranean: 2013-2020, co-authored with Annalisa Camilli, The New Humanitarian, January 12, 2021
Seeking asylum in Italy: assessing risks and options, Forced Migration Review 65, "recognising refugees" feature, Nov. 2020, pp. 50-51, also in Spanish, French and Arabic
Border Agency Recruitment: Circulating Narratives that Criminalize Asylum and Erase Border Violence, co-authored with Sara Riva, Discover Society, October 2020
‘Have I really survived?’: On home, refuge, and quarantine in Rome, co-authored with Khaled Karri, Routed Magazine, “Epidemics, Labour and Mobility” issue, June 2020. Also in Spanish, Chinese, and with the Coronavirus and Mobility Forum of Oxford's Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS)
EU Must Stop Equating Protecting Borders With Asylum Management, The Globe Post, March 5, 2020
Tunisia: North Africa's overlooked migration hub, co-authored with Annalisa Camilli, The New Humanitarian, January 22, 2020
Closing the Vučjak Camp doesn’t resolve the humanitarian crisis for migrants in Bosnia, co-authored with Annalisa Camilli, openDemocracy, December 13, 2019
The White Readymade and the Black Mediterranean: Authoring “Barca Nostra”, co-authored with Nicole Miller, Los Angeles Review of Books, September 22, 2019
Janet Biggs: Overview Effect, co-authored with Nicole Miller, The Brooklyn Rail, Jul. 2019
Italy’s Shutdown of Huge Migrant Center Feeds Racist Campaign to Close Borders, The Globe Post, July 16, 2019
Europe’s refugee crisis explains why border walls don’t stop migration, The Conversation, January 30, 2019
Transit Migration in Europe: Methods and Dialogues, a reflection on my Summer 2017 fieldwork, September 22, 2017
La Pirogue: the Myth of Europe and the Realities of the Journey, review of La Pirogue screening, March 6, 2017
Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) and ‘Practices of Reception’, a review of Fuocoammare screening, February 6, 2017
No, Mr. President-Elect, You Are Mistaken: We Welcome Refugees at the Ohio State University, The Daily Kos, December 8, 2016
Public scholarship
Reviews and translations
Review: Camilla Hawthorne’s Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022), Antipode Online, February 20, 2023.
Review: The Black Mediterranean Collective's The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave, 2021), Antipode Online, November 8, 2021.
Translation: The Two of Me (Io siamo in due) by Gabriella Kuruvilla in M. Orton, G. Parati and R. Kubati (eds.), Contemporary Italian Diversity in Critical and Fictional Narratives, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2021.
Review: Stephanie Malia Hom's Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell UP, 2019), Italian Studies, vol. 74, n. 4, 2019.
Translation: Liquid Border, excerpt from Annalisa Camilli's The Law of the Sea (La legge del mare, Rizzoli, 2019), The New Inquiry, August 20, 2019.
2023 Interviewed for “Unmasking Europe’s Deadly Migration Policy,” by Bianca Carrera Espriu, Green European Journal, Mar. 24
2022 Interviewed for Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, episode: “Motel Rwanda,” June 7
2021 Interview on the Public Cultural Studies podcast, “Migration and Testimony with Dr. Eleanor Paynter,” Oct. 1
2021 Interviewed on TRT World Roundtable, episode: “Do Border Walls Prevent Migration?” Sept. 10
2021 Profile: “Award recipient builds Migrations community at Cornell,” by Priya Pradhan, Cornell Chronicle, Apr. 13
2019 Interviewed for: “Children Die at Record Speed on U.S. Border While Coyotes Get Rich,” by Nacha Cattan, Bloomberg News, Oct. 19