Interest at stake: a non-substantial reading of community

Riace is a small village in Calabria, Southern Italy. Since 1998, Riace Model is worldwide known for addressing both the refugee issues and the inland depopulation challenges in Italy. In studying this case we need to follow the example of Neighbourhood as Refuge (Anguelovski, 2015) and to go beyond former views of environmental justice declaring that the proper meaning of this concept is that every person, regardless of race, income, culture, and gender has the right to a decent quality of life. This embraces improvements in physical and mental health as well as processes able to address stigmas about marginalized communities and to promote democratization and participation in spontaneous planning and citizenry. Given this starting point, can Riace model shift from an integration model to a local governance model able to create an effective link between the satisfaction of human needs and the socio-political capacity and access to resources? First and foremost, to address this question we need a (re)new(ed) concept of community. This means trying to look at it not as a classic object of analysis (in a positivistic and essentialist way), but as a field of multiple trajectories which negotiate a here-and-now (Massey, For Space, 2014) and where different techniques of subjectivation are trying to keep the conversation going (Greenwood & Levin, Introduction to Action Research, 2007). Using an ethnographic and genealogical method, the fieldwork - currently in itinere - aims to understand the processes of stakeholderization as learning to be affected (Marres, No issue, no public, 2005) under specific (and precarious) conditions and in specific (and ever-changing) settings. At the same time, the fieldwork allows to understand the role of the researcher as a mediator in a Latourian sense, as s/he her/himself involved in a process of stakeholderization who can activate new and unexpected collective becomings.