Recently, following events at Cambridge Analytica that put commercial social media under scrutiny, a public debate emerged around corporate digital platforms focused not only on critically analysing their social, economic, political impact but on the creation of alternative spaces of digital communication, organisation and conviviality. The key focus of this chapter is the reappropriation of technology intended as a way to conceive ‘appropriate’ social and technical organisation in opposition to the forms of exploitation and capture put in place by digital platforms. How do practices of reappropriation occur to prefigure new sociotechnical imaginaries and to shape digital spaces and infrastructures, social interactions and relations? In which ways does they engender forms of mutualism? What are the conditions required for the emergence of practices for the reappropriation of technology? What are the configurations, representations and encounters that constitute emerging digital communities? In this chapter, these questions will be examined taking into account the constitution and development of the ‘Fediverse’ – more than a social network, a network of networks – focusing on a digital community that has been at the centre of the authors’ digital ethnographical work since 2018. This case study will be analysed through different standing points and dichotomic tensions: infrastructure (de-centralisation/distribution), design (mutual conditioning/mutual aid), governance (heteronomy/autonomy).

The region of Sicily, in the south of Italy, has been at the centre of diverse contemporary migration movements since the 90s. This has made it an ideal setting for experimentation of new border control devices and procedures at the EU level. This article analyses the constellation of migrant circulations – local and seasonal, trans-local, transnational – characterizing this area, considering them as the product of border configurations, (g)local markets (agriculture, tourism) and migrant’s agency. The scenario has been deeply affected by the current Covid-19 pandemic which transformed global supply chains, local economies and migrant labour, producing a selection of mobilities due to public health reasons. This contribution is based on a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork I have been conducting since 2016 in the Sicilian region, which has continued through the pandemic, from the hotspot border apparatus of Pozzallo to the sites of seasonal informal agricultural work as Cassibile, Ragusa area and Campobello di Mazara. What comes to light from the field is a complex sketch, in which migrants’ movement is the outcome of contrasting drives to push, block, divert and accelerate. I define fitful circulations the result of the friction between the economic need to let move labour power commodity and the sovereign push to select, contain or exclude living labour on the basis of citizenship, race, class and gender, emerging from the intertwine of economic and labour markets configurations, territorial sovereignty administration, public health management and the agency of migrants.

Le politiche confinarie europee ai tempi della pandemia stanno mettendo in luce tutti i limiti di un sistema inadeguato e foriero di problemi e, soprattutto, disumanità.

The article analyses the specific spatiality and temporality regulating the hotspot, which sorts and partitions people who are caught within it, performing specific functions in the management of European borders. This piece is based on the case study of the Pozzallo hotspot, which I studied through subsequent ethnographic stays since 2016.

The present contribution considers the “hotspot approach”, a distinct technology of management and control of mobility within the wider European border regime. This apparatus shows the linkage between the discourses and rationalities on security and humanitarianism, depicting what has been called the “humanitarian border”. To tackle these elements, the activities of medical staff inside the hotspot of Pozzallo, Italy, and their experiences and interactions with other actors are examined through ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews and documentary analysis. The medical expertise is central in shaping procedures and practices of this border technology, outlining a double dimension of care and control in the border administration. Thus, the hotspot fulfils the differential containment and filtering of human mobility within the logic of humanitarian reason.