Giorgia Mirto

EMAILED: GIORGIA MIRTO, PhD Candidate at the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, was awarded funding in April 2023 to aid research on “The Political Life of Border Death in Southern Italy,” supervised by Dr. Naor H. Ben-Yehoyada. This project investigated the interrelation between the political mobilization, bureaucratic processing, and mourning of migrant deaths at sea in Southern Italy, with a particular focus on Sicily. Fieldwork was conducted between 2023 and 2025 and included participant observation at funerary and commemorative events, archival research at local administrative offices handling the bodies of unidentified migrants, collaboration with associations supporting the families of the missing, and the study of how material traces of migration – fragments of boats – are transformed into liturgical objects. At its core the project asks what it means to mourn strangers: those who, according to the classical anthropology of death, were never meant to be mourned. Its findings point to what the grantee terms the “political generativity” of the dead stranger: a process through which anonymous border deaths reshape not only the communities that mourn them, but the very terms through which care, belonging, and political obligation are understood at the limits of Europe’s border regime.