The Borders of Integration: Empowered Bodies and Social Cohesion

This volume introduces sociological knowledge to social reality in various fields that are especially significant for Southern European societies, such as education, migration, social cohesion and political participation. It provides the reader with an understanding of the new and radical challenges that Europe has been called to face, and complements academic research with new conceptualisations of sociology which solve social public problems in specific territorial contexts. The book focuses on the body as the vector of social cohesion policies in the awareness that cohesion revolves around the ability of all people – not just migrants – to manage conflict and change. With these aims, the empowered body is suggested as a means able to build up the timescales of memory as time-windows open to the ethic boundaries of human life. In today’s world, the question of empowerment crosses borders, not only geographic but also cognitive, linguistic and cultural ones. Refuting the longstanding notion that culture alone is responsible for group behaviour, this book confronts the “moving up” and “getting on” characterizing current immigration policies, specifically in Europe and the Mediterranean area and, in general, around the world. Methodologically, all contributions here pay attention to the powerful connection between the individual lives and the historical and socio-economic contexts in which these lives unfold. The brilliant analyses here suggest, at least, the “borderlands” as the agent making the movement of policy.


Bianca Maria Pirani is a Professor of Sociology of Cultural Networks in the Department of Social Sciences at “Sapienza” University of Rome. She is the President and Program Coordinator of the Research Committee 54 “The Body in the Social Sciences” of the International Sociological Association. Her research field focuses on the ways in which biologically experienced time in a technologically shrinking world interacts with cultural traditions, social systems, social innovations, new technologies, embodied memory and with human and community bonds. She has published widely on the ever-increasing insights into the relations between human bodies and social knowledge as editor and author of numerous publications.

“[The volume presents a] disturbing perspective: human beings as bodies, just that, and moving, migrating, with their needs for body sustenance. Look at some chapter titles in this very original collection superbly edited: “The body says run”, “Bodies and corpses on the Mediterranean beaches”, “Migrant bodies”, “Labeling bodies”, “Migrant bodies in search of place”. Disturbing. And true. A partial truth like all others, but a very important truth. [This is a] major book.”
Johan Galtung
Founder of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo; former Professor of the United Nations University, Tokyo

“[This book offers a] very original approach, which considers migration policies as embodied in human beings; in their living bodies, moves, social interactions, corpses and conflicts. Two themes are implicit in the narrative: the tension between the relative invariance of human bodies and their amazing capacity of adaptation. This book calls, indeed, for a new trajectory of thinking and acting within the globalized world: an innovative field aimed at building the “borders of integration” as the changing link between biology and culture, needs and pragmatic goals.”
Dmitry Ivanov
Professor of Sociology, St. Petersburg State University

"The body is the very basis of our personal existence as well as our social existence, as was clear to the founders of our discipline. For Marx the body of the worker was alienated by wage labour that was in turn congealed within commodities that served ‘human needs’ while for Weber the repression of bodily desire, channelled into work, enabled capitalism in the same way that Freud believed the repression of bodily desires was the basis of civilisation. But as the discipline developed, the centrality of the body became obscured as the emphasis on classes, structures, roles and norms, often connected to very positivistic research, led us away from embodiment. This book is a wonderful collection of theoretical and empirical essays that restores the centrality of the body and social life to our analyses. It is especially concerned with the problem of migrations, and how they reflect social, political, economic, and even environmental factors, as people attempt to escape poverty, political or economic repression, wars, and climate change. Moreover, these migrations themselves have become a major social issue with political consequences. This volume is a major contribution to understanding the body as central to a variety of current theoretical movements within our discipline. It will be a major contribution to furthering our understanding of such issues."

Professor Lauren Langman, Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois

Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-5275-1326-2

ISBN13: 978-1-5275-1326-6

Release Date: 9th July 2018

Pages: 341

Price: £64.99

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