Jacob Adam Black Bessen

JACOB BESSEN, then a graduate student at University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on “Giving a House to a Stranger: The Transformation of the Domus and the Recreation of a Region,” supervised by Dr. Valentina Napolitano. The research follows how practices of neighboring mediate the nexus of immigration and emigration in rural Sicily. When Sutera, a rural mountaintop town in the center of the island, opened a migration reception program for families coming from across the Mediterranean, newspapers reported that the aim was repopulation. Given that the town had dwindled from five thousand to one thousand in the past half decade, this idea made sense. To those born in Sutera, reception responds to anxieties that the social and theological value underlaying neighborly relations is dwindling. Prior to post-WWII industrialization, economic, social, and religious life depended on cooperation between neighbors and developed extensive networks of mutuality across difference. The research traces how, amid acute social and economic changes, residents old and new are redefining and practicing neighborliness. First, it follows spatial practices of sharing a cemetery, linking domestic communities, and celebrating in streets and piazzas. Second, it studies archetypical practices of neighborliness, like sharing pantries and collective childcare and its presumably antithetical practices like contact-making.