Lauren Barrett
Current PhD student
Department of Anthropology

My proposed ethnographic research seeks to examine the reception projects run by local authorities through Italy’s System for the Protection of Asylum Seekers and Refugees (SPRAR), and the resulting attitudes towards and strategies for integration developed by displaced women participating in the system. I aim to study the dialogical engagements between refugees and European intermediators as they resettle into a new community. As women engage in the educational and instructional courses designed to help them- as stated in the SPRAR mission statement, to “(re)acquire self-autonomy” within the Italian cultural framework- I aim to explore how discourses of assimilation translate into political, economic, and material realities.