Hope Amid Despair: Encounters at the Existential Borderlands of the Mediterranean (Contemporary Ethnography)

The story of extraordinarily ordinary life on Lampedusa, an island in the Mediterranean and the southernmost frontier of undocumented migration to EuropeHope amid Despair tells the story of life on Lampedusa, a small island in the central Mediterranean and the southernmost frontier of irregular and undocumented migration to Europe, or what is often referred to as Europe's "refugee crisis." Anthropologist Alessandro Corso examines the extraordinarily ordinary choices faced by migrants, migration workers, and locals on the island-and the decisions they make that foster distance, indifference, and abandonment or allow for mutuality, community, and life-building. Through extensive ethnographic fieldwork as well as oral histories and archival research, Corso follows the island's inhabitants through their quotidian encounters, detailing their impressions, misunderstandings, and reconsiderations of one another.Revealing perspectives and experiences that often run against the grain of prevaili