RESILIENCE Project

Research

Documentary-style photo of small-scale and artisanal fishers in a Mediterranean coastal village, featuring traditional boats, fishing nets, and a calm sea at golden hour, with a focus on community and sustainability. Natural colors, realistic, academic project style, no text.

Small-scale and Artisanal Fisheries in Mediterranean region

Local communities are increasingly recognized as holders of knowledge and practices beneficial for ecological transition, yet they are often marginalized by neoliberal economies that favour individual competition and top-down, technocratic policies. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) affirms food sovereignty as the right of communities to determine their own food systems, combining sustainable development with local governance of land and resources. This project employs food sovereignty as a critical tool to analyse the conservation of local identities, the reduction of vulnerabilities, and the promotion of a culturally embedded sustainable transition.

Local communities are increasingly recognized as holders of knowledge and practices beneficial for ecological transition, yet they are often marginalized by neoliberal economies that favour individual competition and top-down, technocratic policies.

Documentary-style photo representing migration, rights, labour, and culture in the Mediterranean. Show a diverse group of migrant women working together in an agricultural field at golden hour, with visible interaction and solidarity. Include subtle visual references to both care work and farm labour, with a Mediterranean village in the soft-focus background. Maintain the same muted, realistic, academic visual style and color palette as the existing fisheries image used in the first research topic column. No overlaid text, no logos.

Migrations: Rights, Labour, Culture

Migrant women are increasingly subjected to intersecting discriminations based on gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality, producing specific forms of vulnerability and dehumanising conditions. This project analyses migrant women employed in the agricultural and care sectors in the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa not as passive victims, but as active agents whose corporeality embodies a wider struggle against contemporary (bio)capitalism. At the same time, the project examines how migrant communities generate transformative practices from below—creating new living environments, relational networks, and forms of interculturality that challenge neoliberal governance. By bringing together theoretical research and empirical observation, the project assesses how resilience practices can be reclaimed as tools for empowerment, radical transformation, and political inclusion.

This project analyses migrant women employed in the agricultural and care sectors in the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa as active agents whose corporeality embodies a wider struggle against contemporary (bio)capitalism, while examining how migrant communities generate transformative practices from below that challenge neoliberal governance.

Territories, risk mitigation policies and institutions

The resilience paradigm generates important reflections on the territorial effects of global emergencies, particularly how national and supranational regulatory measures impact local contexts. This global-local dialectic shapes new social and institutional behaviours, transforming experiences of security, mobility, and the relationship with territory. The project analyses how territorial actors respond to internal and external stimuli—including risk and emergency situations—through evolving configurations of security, redefining evolutionary perspectives and affecting territorialisation processes. By focusing on vulnerability as an analytical category, the research identifies resources and strategies for locally designed resilience interventions.

The project examines how territorial actors respond to risk and emergency situations through evolving configurations of security, while identifying resources and strategies for locally designed resilience interventions based on vulnerability as an analytical category.

A sturdy stone breakwater extending into a calm, steel-blue sea, each block carved with faint, engraved keywords like “rights,” “institutions,” “democracy,” and “solidarity” in Italian and English. The sky is overcast, providing soft, even lighting that gently emphasizes the texture of the weathered stone without harsh shadows. In the blurred distance, a modern city skyline suggests governance and policy. Shot at eye level with a wide-angle lens, the breakwater leads the viewer’s eye into the horizon, creating strong linear perspective. Photographic realism with a restrained, professional color palette. The atmosphere is steady, contemplative, and resilient, symbolizing the protection that robust political structures provide against turbulent crises.

Who we are

The RESILIENCE project is carried out by three interconnected research units based at the University of Palermo, the University of Salerno, and the University of Bari–Lecce. Each unit brings its own expertise and thematic focus, while sharing a common methodological framework and a commitment to advancing critical research on resilience, vulnerability, and political inclusion. Collaboration among the units is fostered through regular meetings, joint events, and shared publications.

Meet the team

Univeristà degli Studi di Palermo

Univeristà degli Studi di Bari – Aldo Moro

Univeristà degli Studi di Salerno

Publications

This section collects the scientific outputs produced by the three research units of the RESILIENCE project. Here you will find peer-reviewed articles, edited volumes, book chapters, and thematic special issues that reflect the project’s critical engagement with the concept of resilience, migration, gender, territory, and contemporary governance.

The publications span multiple languages and academic traditions, showcasing the project’s commitment to interdisciplinary research, international collaboration, and Open Access dissemination where possible.

Explore publications

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Initiatives

An orderly grid of thick, transparent acrylic blocks arranged on a dark wooden academic desk, each block containing a suspended symbol: a constitution icon, a courthouse, a ballot box, a scale of justice, and abstract network nodes. Subtle labels on the desk surface read “Palermo,” “Salerno,” and “Bari,” connecting clusters of blocks with fine ink lines like a research diagram. Warm, directional desk-lamp lighting from the left casts defined, yet soft-edged shadows and gentle reflections on the acrylic surfaces. Photographic realism with a sharp foreground and gently blurred background of academic journals and neatly stacked books. Captured from a slightly elevated angle, the composition feels precise, methodical, and professional, embodying collaborative research on political resilience.

Seminars

Seminars and other events that featured the participation of the RESILIENCE Project members.

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A robust, living olive tree growing in the center of a circular stone courtyard, its roots partially exposed and intertwining with carved stone tiles engraved with abstract diagrams of political systems and arrows indicating feedback loops. The leaves are deep green with silver undersides, catching subtle late-afternoon Mediterranean sunlight that filters through, creating intricate, dappled shadows on the diagrams below. Surrounding walls, slightly out of focus, display plaques with the names of Italian universities in refined lettering. Photographic realism, shot at eye level with a slight tilt upward to emphasize the tree’s branching structure. The mood is scholarly, enduring, and reflective, highlighting resilience as both organic growth and designed governance.

Summer / Winter schools and Conferences

Interdisciplinary labs exploring methods to measure, critique and rethink resilience in the contemporary world.

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