Encontros interculturais entre fronteiras: corpos e afetos migrantes

This research, developed between 2014 and 2018, investigates the meanings of intercultural encounters, mainly in a forced migration context in two cities, Padova, in Italy and São Paulo, in Brazil. Both research and official European documents view interculturality in terms of peaceful and harmonious encounters in which diversity is presented with inherently positive features. Even when conflict is considered, the subject of enunciation is absent, producing disembodied and violent theorizations. This PhD research aims to challenge such forms of understanding by investigating and problematizing the entanglement of meanings that constitute encounters in a migration context on the basis of Latin American thinkers, postcolonial and feminist theories and decolonial concepts concerning difference, culture, ontoepistemology and identity, in order to better understand the influences of modernity, capitalism, neoliberalism and coloniality as an entangled discourse. The research explores the threads which underpin intercultural encounters between migrants and local population, grounding them in the wor(l)d complexity of geographical and historical localized contexts, aiming to understand how coloniality and the geopolitical world order performed and co- created interculturality. Data were generated through interviews, encounters, classroom observation and documental analysis and were used as a provoking-theory tool. The main results point to a process of meaning-making strongly influenced by modern/colonial epistemologies, diffused not only among workers in the field of migration, but also among migrants; the desire to reduce difference, understood in terms of diversity, through integration policies, without questioning their epistemological basis, looking for common essential basis and trapped in the neoliberal net; the presence of political cracks which aim at reconfigurating of intercultural encounters; the need to re-signify ethics, social iustice, transnational citizenship, and democracy through new forms/modalities, voices and subjects in the process of the being-with.