Past Storylines and Present Moves: a Temporal Approach to Migrants' Collective Action

Against all odds, Western societies have registered a steady increase in migrants’ mobilizations, especially over the past couple decades. Against this background, migrants’collective action can no longer be regarded as an exception and, rather, has come to epitomize one key challenge that movements face in contemporary society, namely that ofbringing diversity together. This research explores migrants’ collective action to understand how extremely heterogeneous constituencies coalesce into collective formations thatmobilize as migrants. This study adopts an interpretivist approach to social reality and relies on qualitative methods. Empirically, the research focuses on the Italian context andinvestigates three groups active at the urban level, mobilizing around migration in Naples, Rome and Bologna. Drawing on Social Movement studies and Critical approaches tomigration, the research wishes to complement existing scholarly works by adopting a temporal lens for the study of migrants’ collective action. The approach proposed focuseson biographical trajectories and on collective memory building with the aim of retracing the invisible processes occurring in-between times and spaces of visible mobilization andbeyond the experience of migration alone. Temporality is here approached via three main working concepts: the biographical time of participants, the construction of a collectivememory at the group level, and the process of collective identity building. In turn, the ways in which time is appropriated by participants – via the selection and organization ofbiographical accounts and the construction of a shared social past – inform the processes of collective identifications both at the strategic level of public representation and at the in-group level of political belonging. Finally, the research shows how negotiations occurring around the construction of the past and the conflictual re-articulation of externallyproduced discourses constitute a fundamental step for the coalition of very heterogeneous constituencies.