How to contrast anti-migrant racism? Nurturing reflexivity through a collective analysis of solidarity practices at the urban level

This article presents an innovative research experience based on a method Collective Analysis of Practices (CAoP) used in Venezuela among sociologists engaged in social movements. This method travelled to Padova (thanks to a refugee-researcher) and our proposal is to explore how to contrast anti-migrant racism at the urban level learning from solidarity practices shared through a collective reflexive work. Moreover, we propose to rethink (internal) border struggles in relation to the emergence of political antiracism in Italy. The article starts introducing our theoretical background, connecting migration and urban studies for a renewed focus on the legacies of colonialism and on the relevance of race and (anti)racism. Then we reconstruct our empirical context, showing continuities and changes in Padova’s antiracist political activism. After a presentation of the different phases of the method, we discuss the most interesting issues that emerged: the dilemmas of solidarity facing welfare racism; the limits and potentialities of antiracist practices according to different positionalities; and the need to further coordinate antiracist everyday practices at the urban level, going beyond reactive convergences tied to racist border violence and building together long-term strategies of socio-political change. Our CAoP in Padova showed the importance of building antiracist places and self-aware communities of resistance to counteract a political and economic system that does not care about collective needs, reproduce a migrant-native divide through the rhetoric of zero-sum game of rights and seems to respond only to the imperative of capital accumulation in an increasingly violent way.