This article examines a series of art and media images which contributed to counteracting dominant discourses about migrations. Through recourse to recent research in political science and psychology, it suggests that both the genre of the images and the very nature of their message, contribute shaping opinions and public policies. Specifically, it emphasises how the recurrence of certain motifs helps diffusing a feeling of anxiety about the migration "crisis". On this, this article updates the Funnel of Causality, a theoretical tool elaborated by political scientists to analyse votes behaviour that is now used to understand opinions to migrations (Dennison, 2017). In this scheme, the media effect, among which images play an increasing part, is heard to be of minor importance, whereas moral values appear to be crucial. The present article shows that these very values are fostered by emotions (Tappolet, 2000) which images, in particular images of fiction, are conveying.

A commonplace idea, and worry, in much political art is the emphasis on not to victimize the object/subject in artistic strategies, and to portray people as subjects with agency. And the way to do this is to allow for identification. This article asks if this strong idea might be shaped by an ameliorating guilt for victims, which in turn is partially informed by an inability to free the gaze from a hegemonic view of people as agents on a market. Instead the article looks at some contemporary artists who surface an opposite recognition, the radical lack of power for large groups within the global migration system, without attempts at temporary symbolic solutions. It will be argued that this is and has always been a ground for political mobilisation and solidarity.

Since the rise of modern nation-states, borders have played the important role to order society because they have the power to define territories, not only on the ground, but also on the level of the imaginary by shaping national identities and perceptions of the world. Borders can be intended not as places, rather as processes, as socially constructed and shifting structures of practices and discourses that produce norms of difference and exclusion. Within this context, arts, and particularly performing arts, can play a role in challenging these forms of representation, overturning the spectacle of the border into collective performances. Drawing upon these conceptual premises, the article presents the empirical insights related to Tania Bruguera’s ‘Referendum’. Referendum was intended both as a performance and as a form of political activism, inviting people to vote on the following question: “Borders kill. Should we abolish borders?”. After analysing the collaborative procedure that led to the final results of the performance, we reflect upon the role of arts as pedagogical and political tool capable of changing the existing imagery on borders - and specifically on the Mediterranean Sea - and human mobility, stimulating new forms of debate and responsabilization in terms of co-citizenship.

The article focuses on the process of socialization and sexuality of homosexual people, examining the specific case of lesbians living in Salerno, a major city in southern Italy. The essay highlights the path that women go through in maturing their sexual identity, taking into account those relational contexts in which they find expression of their most intimate desires and support to deal with the burden of double stigma related to the condition of women and homosexuals. The analysis will highlight how “becoming sexual” means above all accessing a universe of symbolic references typical of the L world – in terms of practices, languages and representations – to which some women often adhere out of need of acceptance, to get out of invisibility, while others distance themselves from them for greater self-determination of their sexual conduct.

The article will address Ai Weiwei’s and JR’s political engagement with the refugee crisis in their work, the former as a political artist and the latter as an activist artist. Ai, in a series of conceptual installations and the feature film Human Flow, as did JR at Tecate on the Mexican-US border, sought to shed light on the securitization of migration and the hollowness of neoliberalism’s human rights discourse. More generally, the article will interrogate the roles of the socially concerned political artist and the socially involved activist artist. I argue that Ai and JR strategically employ their celebrity status as darlings of the West neoliberal art world to undermine the securitization and human rights discourses

Research methods that are inspired by the arts have recently become subject to increasing attention for language researchers working in migration contexts. There are several examples that show how arts-based methods can be used in socially-engaged research in order to better understand language practices and ideologies. Drawing on a longitudinal study of lived experience of language use in Sweden, the present article demonstrates how language portraits and poetic transcriptions have the potential to generate alternative narratives and creative forms of representation. Moreover, the article illustrates how participatory action research can prompt migrants to reflect on their experiences and emotions together with others in the creation of drama performances. These kind of visual-, textual-, and performativerepresentations have a connotative force that invites the receiver to emotionally engage with migrants. Such representations can thus function as a trigger for reflection and enable people to react to un-equal sociolinguistic orders.

This is a conversation between Juan del Gado and Elsa Gomis about their respective films. Juan del Gado has made the film Altered Landscapes (2016), which is the first part of a cinematically projected triptych entitled Drifting Narratives. Elsa Gomis has produced the film The People behind the Scenes (2019), a full length film, which builds on interviews and memory work and address current visual representations of migration by the Mediterranean.

Review of the book Fundamental Rights, Gender, Inequalities. Vulnerability and Protection Systems, Gutenberg, Baronissi (SA), 2019, edited by Lucia Picarella and Giovanna Truda. The book collects essays of sociologists about several topics related to fundamental rights and gender issues.