Paper Titles & Abstracts

In the field of European studies, European society has been relatively left aside when sociologically involving individuals: most of the analytical effort has been rather concentrated on Brussels' elites and the top-down dimension of the complex process of European integration. Therefore, a more ground-level sociological study focusing the lived experiences of European integration is missing.In this frame, this research - partly funded by UACES - aims to analyze whether and how the EU impacts European citizens' lives. In practice, the investigation will focus two small-scale fishing communities living along the European external border, in the Italian islands of Lampedusa and in the Spanish one of Fuerteventura. It is there in fact where the presence of the EU is expected to deeply influence locals' daily lives. On the one hand, fishermen activities as well as their lives are profoundly influenced by the Common Fishery Policy, the CFP, a significant area of Community activity consisting of a collection of more than seven hundreds regulations. On the other side, the enlarging of the Schengen space of free movement of people transformed both islands into isolated spots of the enlarging European external border, determining the beginning of the arrivals in both territories of thousands of boat-migrants coming from the coast of North- and West-Africa. Accordingly, through two periods of field-study of four months per island, this investigation aims to asses the combined impacts that these two policies have on local small-scale fishing communities living along the geographical margins of the EU. For each of the two periods of study in the islands, twenty in-depth interviews with local small-scale fishermen will be conducted alongside a constant process of ethnographic-like observation and several structured-interviews with local stakeholders from either the local institutions and the civil society.