Finanziamento UE – NextGenerationEU PRIN 2022 PNRR - S.E.L.F. - Stories of Exclusion and Living Freedom. Archives of sorrow and ethnographies of hidden subversion in mental health institutions:exploring the intersectionality of subalternities - PNRR M4C2 investimento 1.1 Avviso 1409/2022

This project analyses the new conditions of subalternity arising within current transformations of the nation-state, as well as within the racial, institutional andstructural violence that afflicts vulnerable groups, conditions which have only been magnified by the coronavirus pandemic. Using an intersectionalityframework, this interdisciplinary (medical-anthropological and historical) and comparative research aims to promote, in this time of crisis and “End of the World” (De Martino), the civil society participation against any form of newsegregation. Our purpose is: A) to explore lives at the margins, the “trajectories of the last”, and their common characteristics; to understand the ways in which, at the intersection of gender,economic, and symbolic discrimination, different patterns of exclusion interact to produce marginalised and racialised lives and territories, and how we may givea voice to the stratification of subalternities in a single existence. B) to realise an ethnography of areas of social abandonment (the ghettos of our critical time), of the forms of resistance that structurally oppressed groupsorganise with the participation of other subjects; and to enquire into the practices of alliance creation, resistance or subtraction from state control as well as theexpression of dissent in the face of demands for loyalty in order to be considered full citizens. This vast topic will be explored through situated and intensive research in specific Italian contexts. Each research unit will conduct an investigation to outline theprincipal problems concerning the relation between subalterns, knowledge, state and institutions, through two main actions: 1) The analysis of psychiatric archives, that will be scrutinised, taking the body of unsorted documentations of their protagonists as the starting point. This is awidely unexplored area in the ethnography of state institutions that sits within a landscape of epistemic conflict, moral suffering, and institutional struggle. 2) Fieldwork in four ethnographic sites (Turin, Perugia, Naples and Messina) to focus on: multiple trajectories of people living in abject spaces; the strains andconflicts between marginalised or oppressed communities and territories, and institutions over the use of public spaces and natural resources; the diverse formsof activism of the former; the epistemic violence embodied in the nation-state (such as the denial of bottom-up production of knowledge). The project will provide several outcomes: a digital database and an Atlas of suffering and resistance (LIFE), in order to document a counter-archive of livingfreedom; training courses for health professionals and social workers; a podcast season and a radio-in-progress activity, to join with specific associations(patients, family members, peers, volunteer) a new public (students, youth, health professionals recently trained); one publication and a Final Conference/Festival in Messina.