Italians First: the rise of right wing populism in two working-class neighbourhoods of Rome.

The proposed project will be an ethnographic study of right-wing populism, as it emerges among working-class urban communities in Pigneto and Torpignattara, two adjacent working-class neighbourhoods of South-Eastern Rome. Here the conditions of social reproduction have been dramatically reshaped by crises in capital accumulation, recession and austerity politics, as well as by broader and longstanding processes associated with neoliberal globalisation. The project will look at my informants' situated and 'classed' experiences, practices and discourses, to consider how these have come to articulate with the themes and representations of an authoritarian, neo-nationalist populist ideology. The questions I ask include the following: How is sociality reconfigured in the current historical circumstances and how does it acquire new political meanings? Which are the historically informed ways of relatedness and cultural repertoires upon which these new forms of public sociality draw? And how do they actually transform them? How do different structures of collective life impact a community's capacity to contest and resist processes of symbolic and material dispossession?
To answer these questions, my project will pursue three interrelated lines of inquiry. Firstly, I will investigate the relationship between processes of territorialisation, local strategies of social reproduction and the production of difference. Secondly, I am interested in exploring the interactions between local working-class traditions of solidarity and current exclusionary ideologies. Thirdly, I want to investigate the possible linkages between everyday practices of community and nationalism as a form of identification. This project will add to a well-established anthropological literature on class and the production of right-wing populism in Italy by Blim, Celiksu, Stacul and Loperfido. While these works have engaged their object through historico-structural or discursive approaches, and centered the experiences of political militants and party-activists, I hope my study will provide an insightful ethnographic perspective by engaging the common and yet marginal experiences of 'ordinary' people, through a combination of participant observation, life-history interviews and archival research.
The proposed project will build on and expand the findings of my earlier fieldwork in the area, interrogating the interconnections between the rise of right wing populism and those social processes I addressed in my previous work, such as the particularization of relationships of trust and solidarity in the face of an increasingly precarized everyday life. The project thus analyses local livelihood strategies and the ways in which these can work to reinscribe forms of hierarchy and difference. At the same time, I am interested in the ways in which interactions and exchanges across the faultines of race and class are conceptualised, performed and policed, and how collective identities are realized, negotiated and contested through such practices. Finally, I will consider how the decline of traditional forms of organised collective life can allow for, or hamper, the emergence of new, common political subjects.
This study-which is meant as a Southern-European interjection to a growing body of scholarship looking at right wing populism in Europe and globally-participates in broader disciplinary debates on the social reproduction of working-class communities, on citizenship and subjectivity, on community and its relationship to ethics and politics and on nationalism. It is my hope that it will also help further our shared understanding of the relationships between processes of commoning and processes of class formation, and political economy and moral economies