PISTE researchers were present last week in Warsaw at the IMISCOE Annual Conference “Migration and Inequalities: In search of answers and solutions” both as auditors and as proponents of a specific panel on political participation of people with immigrant background in Small- and Medium-Sized Towns. The panel “Migrants’ participation right in Small and Medium-sized Towns (SMTs). Constraints, challenges, opportunities”, proposed by PISTE researchers Dr. Alba Angelucci and Dr. Silvia Pitzalis, saw a large participation of scholars and three presentations: firstly, Dr. Paola Bonizzoni and Dr. Iraklis Dimitriadis presented their research Civil society and refugees in Italy: a comparative perspective on border and dispersal SMTs, focusing on the Italian towns of Como and Busto Arsizio; then, Federico Rossi showed provisional results of a research co-authored with Ona Schyvens, Dr. Stijn Oosterlynck and Dr. Eduardo Barberis, called Small cities, large conflicts. Radical right parties and the politics of integration policy-making in two European small cities and based in Fermo (Italy) and in the PISTE partner town of Ninove (Belgium); finally, Dr. Athanasia Andriopoulou presented Changing patterns of political participation and
representation of immigrants in SMTs: challenges and opportunities in Fermignano, based on findings from the PISTE project in Italy.
Our panel was not the only one focusing on Small- and Medium-Sized Towns. Indeed, the growing interest on this topic is certainly witnessed by the large number of presentations and panels about different aspects of immigration towards these places, mostly proposed by other EU-funded projects on these issues. Among the others, we particularly point out the Whole-Comm series of panels about local immigrant policy-making, the panel “Leaving, staying, returning? The role of the media narratives and discourses in the relationship between migrations and shrinking areas”, organised by researchers from Welcoming Spaces, and the panel “Synergies between H2020 research projects on ‘local integration’, in which representatives of the Horizon2020 projects Whole-Comm, Welcoming Spaces, MATILDE, ReROOT and MIMY discuss how their main findings relate among each other. This interest bodes well for the acknowledgement of the incresingly important role of Small- and Medium-Sized Towns in contemporary migration processes and for the creation of new knowledge to deal with challenges and opportunities of diversity within these places.
