Comprendere rotte migratorie fuori dall’accademia: metodi, linguaggi, potenzialità, limiti, posta in gioco.

Migration routes today are deeply questioning anthropology not only theoretically, but also, and above all, about its application. Anthropological research focused on the field of migration on one side "naturally" investigates and breaks through the political and public sphere, on the other contemplates social repercussions and forms of information and dissemination. For this reason, the analysis of migration routes often takes the form of intervention using languages, methodologies and communication channels alternative to the scientific publications, increasingly varied and straightforward. More frequently, techniques such as mapping tools, multi-site information and synchronised data platforms, visual documentation, migrant self-productions, etc. are used to document and analyse migration, involving new methods and communicative languages. Moreover, these works take place within interdisciplinary networks where the research and investigation methods are shared and overlapped with multiple communicative languages and styles. In recent decades, an analytical and communicative approach was built that, although rooted in the anthropological perspective, draws on both languages and unconventional technological tools to investigate and act on the migration routes. In this AP Forum we would like to engage with this parallel world to public anthropology, questioning us first of all about the ways in which professional skills are expressed in the field and on the reasons that led to move towards these styles and languages that re-articulate and overcome conventional forms of scientific communication. What are the methodological and positioning issues of the multiple action planning to deal anthropologically with the issue of migration routes? While on the one side it opens up to a range of research and intervention possibilities through which innovating the discipline itself, on the other conflicts and compromises are often generated by the application of an anthropological perspective. How this relationship between potentiality and limits articulate on such debated issue as migration routes? What tactics can be put in place to articulate this dialectic relationship? Finally, what is the stake that these consolidated ways of doing ethnography of migration bring into the field of questioning cultural and public anthropology? In particular, we are interested in affinities and discontinuities with respect to the conventional methods of research, asking ourselves if could be a dialogue (or not) and a possible way of collaboration between these different worlds of investigation and analysis.