What affective rupture does. Disrupting affective citizenship in migrant solidarity

The aim of this paper is to show how emotions and citizenship are inextricably intertwined in the analysis of migrant solidarity. It does so by highlighting the ‘disrupting’ dimensions of emotions as processes that redefine the very criteria by which one is included or excluded, close or distant, intimate or foreign, in every situation. The essay draws on ethnographic research with Italian citizens doing solidarity work for and with migrants in Florence and Turin. Solidarity practices and the emotions that constitute them are important for the production of lived citizenship, which happens on a daily basis. By discussing results that emerged through qualitative methods, the essay has the aim to investigate the role of affective ruptures in migrant solidarity networks, and how they may be emotional and reflexive turning points that transform the ethical-political attitudes.

Over the last two decades, migration has become one of the most emotionally charged subjects of political debate across the European Union. Scholarship has extensively documented the deployment of emotions such as fear, anger, and pride by anti-immigrant politicians, media figures, and interest groups. But how do emotions, through their disruptive power, become the basis for activist engagements with migration? And how do these engagements (such as mundane acts of community support or involvement in formal activist networks) contribute to restructuring the boundaries of citizenship? The aim of this work is to show how emotions, migrant solidarity, and citizenship are inextricably intertwined. It does so by highlighting the ‘disrupting’ dimensions of emotions as processes that redefine the very criteria by which one is included or excluded, close or distant, intimate or foreign, in every situation. The essay draws on ethnographic research with Italian citizens doing solidarity work for and with migrants in Florence and Turin. This case study provides rich insights on the situated-relational production of citizenship which happens on a daily basis, through affectively connoted acts of community support and activism. Solidarity practices and the emotions that constitute them are an important aspect of understanding how individuals are linked and transformed through rights and responsibilities. The recursive interactions between local communities and those excluded from formal citizenship such as refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants redefine the symbolic boundaries of belonging, structuring new ways of being We.

The essay is situated theoretically within a plausible pragmatist approach to the sociology of emotions (Bruni, 2019; Candiotto & Dreon, 2021; Dewey, 1894; Mead, 2017), which encompasses relational and reflexive dynamics (Albrecht, 2018; Burkitt, 2012; Holmes, 2010). Rather than discussing what emotions are, this work will focus on describing what emotions pragmatically do (Ahmed, 2004; Mead, 2017), transforming and rearticulating the connections. For this reason, the essay will focus on the disruptive aspects of emotions, in their eruptive and reflective emergence in the face of the unexpected, the ambiguous, and the surprising. This essay will highlight the implicit activism of affectivity to analyse the practices (intentional or unintentional, individual or collective) that generate situations in which emotions emerge during moments of a disruption in involvement, breaking established habits of feeling belonging, creating new sites of contestation, identification, and recognition. It is a question of redefining activism as the activity of producing acts that disrupt habits and habitus (Isin, 2009), which always have an affective dimension. The social world is made up of differences (cultural, ethical, etc.), which are continuously mediated through the development of emotionality and its reflexivity in the face of disruptions in interaction. Therefore, it is the size of the disruption that provides an opportunity to rethink the relationship between emotions and citizenship in a relationally situated way.

The essay aims to investigate the role of affective rupture in migrant solidarity networks, and how they may be emotional and reflexive turning points that transform the ethical-political attitudes. However, as will be described, disruption is not always synonymous with transformation. Some ruptures are transformative and, in some circumstances, can have broader political resonance leading to further ruptures, deeply transforming the way people perceive belonging and citizenship. In other cases, ruptures lead to the hardening and restoration of one's values. These are the cases in which people who are hostile towards migration accuse those in solidarity with migrants, in more or less symbolic ways, of being traitors, ‘criminalising’ their involvement. The affective rupture is therefore present in both processes of transformation and maintenance of the social order.

The first section will be dedicated to the theoretical reconstruction of emotional processes, showing how they concern disruptive dynamics in tangled relationships, producing both reflexivity and the transformation of those involved. The second section will describe the research process, including methodologies, sample characteristics, strategy of analysis, and a contextualisation of research outcomes. The third section will show how similar processes of disruption connect affective citizenship with the concrete practices of solidarity that constitute it. Importantly, the disruption of affectivity will be observed in action by analysing the involvement of local communities in supporting refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants in Italy, while shedding light on its practical effects on the wider community.

This section will address emotions through two primary aspects: their unfolding in sequences of relationships and their manifestation in episodes of disruption. These two aspects are deeply intertwined. The first concerns the dynamic and relational character of every emotion. The emotions of individuals are always interdependent, intertwined with each other, and represent the concrete inter-corporeal development of social life. The second aspect shows how there is no sequence of relationships without transformations and disruptions which, at various levels and intensities, are present in every social interaction. Emotions are the inter-corporeal experience of social life. Being connected to each other is what conditions and transforms the emotions we feel in every situation. We emotionally experience that in which we are engaged (Fuchs, 2017), that to which we are sensitive, and that to which we give value, because of our connection to the world, through tendencies towards actions that align, collide, or conflict with the world (Frijda, 1986). Social interdependence is thus always a corporeal and emotional interdependence that finds form in the habits, norms, and values that constitute being together. Therefore, there is always a circularity between what people feel and the way in which they are connected and bound to each other (Bateson, 1963). Although emotions are also physiological phenomena, they can never be understood outside of their concrete practical contexts, which are the sociocultural and political worlds in which people live. The idea here is that emotions are formed, sustained, and made intelligible through what they are involved in. Involvement, as an interactive structure in which lives are linked, is the relational context within which emotions operate. But, at the same time, emotions also structure and produce the ways in which individuals are involved.

However, the unfolding of involvement always requires, to varying degrees, its continual disruption and redefinition. A sequence of reciprocal actions, however institutionalised, reproduced and adjusted to situations, will never be identical to another. Those involved as well as the situations, conditions, and previous experiences all change. This is why getting involved is always about the continuous change and fracture of the ways of being connected: disruption is not the opposite of involvement, but its constitutive dynamic. It is through pragmatist theories of emotions, particularly those of Mead (2017) and Dewey (1894, 1895), that we understand the role of disruption in emotional experience. Emotion has been treated by these authors as the adaptive tension between a habit and its disruption in the face of the sudden, the unexpected, the surprising. Every one of us is guided in daily life by affective habits (Candiotto & Dreon, 2021; Dewey, 1894) which orient our dispositions affectively towards certain events, objects, and situations to which people are more sensitive than others. The ethical, perceptive, and aesthetic orientations of social conduct are also rooted in affective habits. Shared habits are thus the scaffolding of emotional feeling and vice versa, as habits are enacted thanks to emotional conduct. However, what is important about the concept of affective habits is, perhaps counterintuitively, the opportunity for disruption at the core of habits.

Emotional changes in those who experience the disruption of a habit are a corporeal adaptation to the unexpected and to ambiguity. The inhibition of action due to the conflict between different potential responses to a given situation is mediated by the adjustment or transformation of the emotions of those involved. If habit is the rooted tendency to repeat patterns to which we are accustomed, the disruption of habit is the difference between previous experience and the uniqueness of the concrete situation. Emotion is therefore accentuated in the experience of having to redefine oneself and the other in the face of the changing situation. Astonishment, wonder, surprise, uncertainty, and suspicion are frequently disruptive emotions that have the role of recomposing new ways of being involved. This concerns the epistemic dimension of every emotion (von Maur, 2022) and its role in the inter-corporeal and inter-affective development of social life. The disruption of these affective habits is a stimulus to interpret our emotions and those of others through emotional reflexivity (Burkitt, 2012; Holmes, 2010).

Emotional reflexivity has been described as ‘the capacity to interpret and act on one's own and others’ feelings’ (Holmes, 2014, p. 34) and as the way in which ‘emotion colours reflexivity and infuses our perception of others, the world around us and our own selves’ (Burkitt, 2012, p. 458). It is the process of interpreting one's own emotional behaviours and the intersubjective adjustments or conflicts between those involved. The disruption of affective habits, and the consequent emotional reflexivity increase in moments of rapid social change (Holmes, 2021), moments in which there is some ambiguity about how to feel and how to act. Each of us is oriented by unreflexive affective habits that need not be questioned or changed until the opportunity presents itself for their disruption. Situations that break habits of action promote reflexivity, internal dialogue, and the redefinition of what to feel and under what circumstances. This requires rethinking the relationship between emotions and society in a more dynamic and relational key.

Tavory and Fine (2020) argue that the importance of harmonisation in social theory has been overstated, obscuring the generative role of disruption. The authors draw a distinction between a ‘disruption-of relations’ and a ‘disruption-for relations.’ The former is the internal disruption of the relationship that leads to a greater alignment of actions that allow for the performance of consolidated models of interaction through the repair of disruptions. The latter indicates the moment in which the order of interaction cannot continue, the bond between participants has changed and new ways of being connected are established. It is possible to explore this second meaning in order to understand how affectivity breaks through consolidated ways of thinking, behaving, and feeling, changing the fabric of the rights and responsibilities that bind persons together. The implicit and quiet (Askins, 2015) activism of affectivity is the involved activity (intentional or unintentional, individual or collective) that produces new ways of feeling emotionally connected and bound to one another, transforming the networks of rights and responsibilities that sustain such bonds. The term activism is understood here in the literal sense, meaning involvement that performs ‘acts’ that disrupt the established habits and habitus of ethical and political sensitivity (Isin, 2009). Such acts bring visibility to issues that require us to transform our behaviours, our values, and the evaluations we make. Activism means bursting in, interrupting, and making visible the patterns of interaction that produce oppression, thereby calling for new forms of responsibility. The disruptions of affective habits, discussed in this section, are a key process for understanding and analysing micro-transformations, emotional reflexivities, and political resonances on a larger scale. Emotions as proto-evaluative practices are always intimately linked to the situated ethics that orients interactions. Such disruptions, irruptions, and interruptions can always become politicised and lead to reflexivity and transformations. This sometimes happens regardless of the intentionality of individuals.

The role of emotions in sustaining political activism has been addressed in various ways (Flam & King, 2005; Goodwin et al., 2001; Jasper, 1998). Rather than identifying some emotions as implicitly political, the perspective discussed above highlights the importance of situational dynamics and concrete involvement in them, made up of disruptions, conflicts, and transformations. However, no emotion is political outside of the concrete situations that contextualise people's involvement. Giving importance to involvement helps to highlight the intersection of emotions and citizenship through a situated and ‘activist’ perspective (Isin, 2009).

What has been described directly concerns the lived (Lister, 2007), practical, and substantial experience of citizenship. As an alternative to the analysis of the formal-juridical rules through which citizenship status is assigned, affective involvement shows how concrete belonging is built in daily interactions, in recognition, interest, and participation. However, this never happens outside of the infrastructures of power that legitimise or de-legitimise both the objects of involvement and those who must be emotionally involved. The affective turn within citizenship studies (Ayata, 2019; De Wilde & Duyvendak, 2016; Di Gregorio & Merolli, 2016; Fortier, 2010; Hung, 2010; Merolli, 2016; Mookherjee, 2005; Vrasti & Dayal, 2016; Zembylas, 2013) shows how emotions are constitutive aspects of the reproduction or transformation of socio-political assets. They directly concern the relational, corporeal, and lived experience of belonging through which responsibilities take shape. Every form of politics implicitly or explicitly prescribes to citizens and non-citizens what they should feel towards themselves, towards members of certain social groups and towards events in general. It can legitimize and foster respect, suspicion, compassion, hostility, a sense of similarity or a sense of difference. The concept of affective citizenship allows us to problematise how someone really feels (Fortier, 2010) towards the nation, towards the community, towards others, and towards oneself. The analysis of emotions favours a critical look at the practices that sustain the different regimes of inclusion and exclusion (Ayata, 2019). Some feelings towards specific social objects are recognised and favoured, while others are sanctioned and deplored. However, emotionality is always two-sided: it can maintain and it can transform the sociopolitical order. Affectivity can therefore explain both the processes of exclusion as well as those of emancipation and can, therefore, take the form of a place of conflict, convergence, or political alliance. Acts of solidarity between members of groups separated by affective and moral barriers are therefore acts that disrupt and require a redefinition of the criteria by which these barriers are reproduced. Affective involvement and responsibility are, in some circumstances, true acts of citizenship.

Isin (2008) defines acts of citizenship as a way in which, through acts, one constitutes oneself as a citizen regardless of formal legal status. These are acts that have the function of breaking some habits and habitus of attention by establishing moments of listening and a transformation in the way of being citizens. They are acts that make it possible to make visible, trace, and transform the boundaries of belonging to a political community. These acts, in all their forms, problematise and make visible the moral (Tronto, 1993) and affective boundaries of belonging (Lampredi, 2023a). It is the disruption of such modes of established life, through inconvenient and delegitimised involvements that reconfigure the sense of belonging and the situated ways in which one is included or excluded. The disruption of norms, habits, and habitus provides an opportunity to re-interpret what is taken for granted and establish new responsibilities; while other times it reinforces the behaviours that support these established conventions, leaving the asymmetries of power unchanged. The political community, says Rancière, is a ‘community of interruptions’ (1999, p. 137) and fractures. Acts of solidarity towards migrants and ‘outsiders’ challenge the exclusive solidarity of citizenship as a status. The contradiction of citizenship in creating internal spaces of solidarity and external spaces of ‘exclusionary force of non-membership’ (Turner, 2000, p. 135) is undermined by the emotions that create new interpersonal bonds between individuals with different statuses. Solidarity emerges as mediation between individuals with different positions (in terms of status, class, race, gender, ethnicity, etc.) (Schwiertz & Schwenken, 2020), overcoming the boundaries of established communities. For this reason, citizenship as an ‘act’ is distinguished from citizenship as status and habitus. An act is ‘a rupture in the given’ (Isin, 2008, p. 25) and is therefore oriented towards the incessant process in which belonging disintegrates and recreates itself in new ways. Solidarity, in some cases, is a disruption of the most usual ways of regulating belonging. Solidarity is an ‘involved doing’ with practical and disruptive consequences on the established ways of including and excluding. The affective consequences of these ruptures, in some cases, compel us to redefine the relations of solidarity between individuals, going beyond the boundaries of the exclusive solidarity of citizenship as status. The affective relationships that emerge from these ruptures compel us to approach (and bind together) the notions of citizenship and solidarity in an anti-essentialist way.

This is why involvement is an ethical practice of transformation above all and can always be politicised by transforming the affective boundaries that separate each group, generating new forms of belongings and establishing rights and responsibilities within relationships. Getting involved transforms and turns outsiders into insiders, strangers into intimates. The affective barriers become thinner and can in some cases disappear. Getting involved always concerns new ways of ‘knowing’, in which disruptive emotions emerge with epistemic qualities (Candiotto, 2019) like wonder, surprise, and amazement, but also doubt, suspicion, fear, and discomfort. These are emotions that, in one way or another, reconfigure inclusion and exclusion through responsibility. Social intertwining is therefore always a fluctuating and eccentric balance of similarity and difference. Emotion is the articulator of citizenship because it reconfigures the affective criteria that sustain inclusion and exclusion.

The paper sample is part of a wider research, which took place in Florence and Turin between 2020 and 2021.¹ The aim of the project is to analyse the emotional experience of those in civil society involved in the social problems of migrants. These people actively participate in a solidarity network with acts of care, support, and activism. In particular, the project investigates how the affective dimension of citizenship emerges from the interweaving of situated responsibilities. The analysis of practical and political situations of care was fundamental in understanding changes in the affectivity of those involved and at the same time understanding the formation of new and unexpected responsibilities.

This paper draws from a rich dataset of empirical materials, totalling 49 semi-structured interviews, six audio-diaries, and approximately fifteen months of participant and non-participant observation. The time spent at the two sites was spent getting to know individuals and organisations involved with migrant solidarity. This was done by attending public events, reaching out to key gatekeepers, and spending time in community spaces where migrants can access support services. Participants in this research were recruited through snowball sampling and selected based on their direct involvement in solidarity activities aimed at producing environments fostering social inclusion towards migrants. When first contacting participants, it was explained that the interview would focus on their daily feelings and emotional experiences regarding their solidarity work. To safeguard privacy, participants are assigned pseudonyms and their identity is protected through the omission of potentially identifying information. The research project sample comprises political activists (those who perform activism with the goal of advocacy, demonstrations, and influencing national-European policies), professionals (such as medical doctors, lawyers, psychologists, and educators), members of local associations and NGOs (Doctors Without Borders, ASGI,² Save The Children, MEDU,³ Red Cross and local organisations), people involved on a personal level (ex-migrants, partners of migrants, adoptive parents of unaccompanied foreign minors, tutors of unaccompanied foreign minors) and Italian families who cohabit with migrants. It is in interviews conducted with this project sample that the theme of disruption, and of unexpected disruption especially, most prominently emerged.

Some of the local organisations with which I carried out observations are associations of families who host migrants in their homes (non-participant observation at home, at board meetings, and public assembly) and informal networks of citizens committed to providing migrants with services, training, and support (participant observation). The investigation of participant engagement through different methodologies, such as interviews and close observation of how participants reinterpret their more-or-less habitual acts, offers diverse perspectives on how people define and practise their own emotional involvement in pro-migrant solidarity. I added audio-diaries, which are a methodology that Cottingham and Erickson (2020) define as ‘window into the ‘spontaneous’ and varied experiences of emotion’ (p. 550) because it provides access to more private, unpopular, and reflexive emotions. This method gives privileged access to participants’ experiences and thoughts without the physical presence, and allows to further remove the potential mediating influence of the researcher. After the interview, participants were given instructions to send short and simple audio messages on WhatsApp (4–10 min), following provided guidelines, reflecting, and speaking about relevant affective experiences.

Empirical materials were coded using the ATLAS.ti software and conducting a thematic analysis. The analysis was performed by assigning to significant quotations a code belonging to higher levels of abstraction (family of codes, such as emotions, values, turning points, resources, constraints, conflicts, etc.). The analysis followed an abductive logic (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014) favouring deep contextualisation and constant comparison of participants’ experiences represented by the codes. The emotional aspects of participants’ experiences are here qualitatively interpreted through the participants’ voices, their stories, and the materials they provided. Rather than analysing and discussing individual emotions as most recurrent or most important, this research was more interested in analysing relational and practical situations that affect participants’ emotional experiences. The quotations discussed in the next section were chosen because they are representative of a frequently encountered process composed of ruptures, reflexivity, and transformations. The participants’ voices provide an opportunity to reconstruct their emotional reflexivity, analyse how they interpret their affective involvement and the transformation of their political engagement. Rather than analysing some emotions as implicitly political, based on their being collective and having shared targets, the perspective discussed thus far provides an opportunity to politicise the concrete situations in which emotions generate, interrupt, or shatter established norms and habits that produce oppression. No emotion is political in itself outside of the concrete situations in which it occurs. All emotions are potentially political and none are political outside of their concrete context of realisation. Rather than analysing the specific subjectivity of the activist and their political imaginary, studying the moments of affective-relational disruption provides an opportunity to analyse what these disruptions produce, generate, contest, and transform. That is, analyse what emotions pragmatically do by breaking established interactive models.

In this section, it will be described how, in the daily lives of those in solidarity with migrants, there are many occasions for affective ruptures and, consequently, opportunities for emotional reflexivity. Getting involved in the life of migrants can constitute a chance for significant shifts in one's understanding and perspectives. Not only because through an encounter people learn of different attitudes towards life, morals, and affectivity, but also, and most importantly, because people discover aspects of themselves and their loved ones that they did not previously know about. We discover ignored responsibilities, facts that are unknown, forgotten, or made invisible.

Some affective and meaningful habits break down in the face of obscured interdependencies that are ignored until the opportunity for their visibility arises. Affective habits are tendencies to select and make relevant some affective stimuli rather than others, which are often preconscious and taken for granted. Each individual has their own affective valences that guide their attention, until they are disrupted and remade in the face of the unexpected. This leads to a reflexivity that redefines one's emotions and how one should morally feel in a situation, establishing new feeling rules (Hochschild, 1983; Holmes, 2010).⁴ These episodes of disruption are of crucial importance in the lives of those involved with migrant activism. Episodes of disruption that may start in mundane conversations then go on to become a crucial part of how the participants described their own story of involvement. In these episodes, supporters find the possibility of configuring involvement in solidarity as an ethical practice of transformation. Giorgia and Claudio, a couple from Turin who have been hosting migrants in their home since 2019, spoke about their eye-opening ‘moment of disruption’. They recalled an interaction with the Guinean youth that lived with them for a time.

This passage is significant for many reasons. The first is the rupture that the family experienced in discovering (or perhaps remembering) how much European colonialism has entered the corporeality of the inhabitants of colonised territories, to the point of defining their emotional culture and even a popular expression used to describe the feeling of happiness (‘I’m as happy as someone who has found a diamond that no one has taken away’). This aptly describes the fabric of unhappiness that has accompanied and continues to accompany the relationship that Guinea has with the European territories. The second reason why it is significant is the negative surprise of the family in finding out that, unknowingly or otherwise, they themselves, the national state of which they are citizens, and the commercial products they consume, have a huge impact on the precariousness of distant strangers. Even though everyone (or almost everyone) has the resources and the means to learn about the exploitative effects of a never-quite-finished colonialism, once these elements are openly mentioned within the interaction, they affect how the conversation unfolds and how the relationship can evolve in the future. The third reason for its significance is precisely this: the habitual disruption of what is taken for granted. The disruption of affective habits, in this case, leads to a reflection on the cost of one's rights and privileges. These rights and privileges are always inextricably tied to the precariousness of people distant in space and time, but this interconnectedness is not so evident until that distance is bridged. From affective and daily ruptures, profound emotional reflexivities can emerge, which contribute to reorienting one's ethical and political attitude.

For some people, discovering new aspects of themselves was even more upsetting. There are many episodes of abjection (Young, 1990) and relational colonialism, in the experience of people who decide to commit to programmes of migrant hosting. This was Giada's experience, who, together with her husband, decided to buy a large house to host several unaccompanied minors and integrate them into the family at the same time. They recall,

Such feelings had not occurred before their direct involvement, but only in the possibility of practical and concrete intimacy and proximity. What emerged was the occasion for a profound re-evaluation of oneself and of how much some labels and prejudices that people reflexively repudiate ‘stick’ to them without their wanting them to. This was an opportunity for greater self-awareness that allowed for the reflection, evaluation, and interpretation of those feelings and their reorientation. In some cases, getting involved does this above all: it brings out and makes the boundaries (moral, symbolic, affective) that separate people ‘visible’, and transforms them.

This is an example of how solidarity involves the practical rupture of our behaviours in the face of the unexpected and promotes greater emotional reflexivity, which leads to changing the depth of our involvement in the world. Even among those most supportive to the migrant cause, there might be implicit racism and lurking forms of ‘othering’. But without situations of deep rupture, it is very difficult to make such contradictions visible, to reflect on them, and to overcome them. All forms of oppression (racism, sexism, ableism, ageism) are sustained by dominant affective-interactive habits (Young, 1990), supporting forms of de-responsibility and structural blindness (Mills, 1997). By hindering involvement, one also hinders responsibility. The implicit and daily rupture of emotions is an important process for understanding the moments in which oppressions are weakened through the institutionalisation of new responsibilities and new ways of feeling. New responsibilities mean alteration of the very criteria by which we are united or divided, included or excluded. What is broken and transformed is a border, which simultaneously connects and distances the members of different social groups. These boundaries are affective and moral membranes that make the orientation of responsibility possible. These membranes can institutionalise themselves in boundaries that are material (barbed wire, walls, law enforcement), legal (criteria by which one accesses formal citizenship), symbolic (to produce otherness and narrate it) and affective (similarity, difference, empathy, hostility, solidarity, otherness). Each boundary enables responsibility towards some and disables it towards others.

The supportive ties between local communities and migrants offer a privileged perspective to observe how, through the practice of caring and solidarity, new ways of feeling ‘belonging’ and citizenship are institutionalised. This can challenge the very criteria of citizenship and the emotional bonds that sustain them. The following is an excerpt from Alice’s audio-diary, as she reflects on her hosting experience,

Alice emphasises the conflicting dimension of getting involved and the difficulty in understanding her right and ‘appropriate’ relational ways. The moments when lives come together and separate can create painful and provocative scenarios for the emotional lives of those involved. Distance, proximity, estrangement, and intimacy acquire their affective dimension in accordance to the meaning of such involvement. In some cases, caring solidarity is the concrete alteration of the boundaries that give value and importance to individuals, things, and situations (Tronto, 1993). The affective rupture that emerges from some acts of solidarity broadens this conception and leads to reconsidering the performativity of the moral boundaries that people exercise in their bonds. Herein lies the activist potential of emotions and with the affirmation of new ways of doing citizenship (Pratesi, 2018). On a daily basis, people exercise rights and responsibilities that are not formally envisaged by the legal system, which therefore have a special role in explaining the change in the ways of being citizens and social change in general. It is in that moment, through acts of responsibility and the assertion of rights, that new ways of feeling emotionally linked to each other are produced. This also transforms the intertwining of rights and responsibilities that sustain these emotional bonds. The acts of solidarity can be true affective acts of citizenship (Fortier, 2016). They disrupt established habits and habitus and require us to act and respond in unprecedented ways. This provides an opportunity to reinterpret activism as a subverting practice of the moral, affective, and ethical boundaries that impede mutual involvement in problems and situations of oppression.

Emotions play a fundamental role in triggering processes of ethical and political transformation from below, making moral boundaries more visible in what people usually take for granted. This is what getting involved in solidarity in intercultural contexts does: (1) it renders explicit and visible what is implicit and invisible, (2) it surprises, amazes, and disrupts our affective habits, and (3) it compels us to an emotional reflexivity that leads to a transformation of values, relationships, affections, and political priorities.

In the next section, it will be described how the affective rupture is not restricted to the private lives of those in solidarity alone, but it reverberates through the wider community, which reacts in convergence with or hostility against solidarity towards migrants.

In this sub-section, it will be discussed how affective rupture is not a process exclusively restricted to micro-interactions, but how it resonates through the larger community where solidarity relationships take place. However, disruption is not synonymous with transformation. For some, in certain circumstances, ruptures lead to reflexivity, evaluation and profound transformation, while for others, ruptures lead to a hardening of one's values and attitudes, favouring the restoration of consolidated values that have been ‘disturbed’. On the one hand, affective ruptures promote greater solidarity in the broader community; on the other hand, this solidarity is an unexpected fracture that generates resentment and anger. However, the affective rupture is at the centre of both processes and is consequently based on the diversity of the situations and participants, an opportunity for transformation or restoration. The social-political effects of the rupture depend on the concrete situations in which the ruptures take place and on the fabric of norms, values, and priorities that make up the social network. However, every emotional rupture always produces ‘resonances’ (McDonnell et al., 2017) that make visible an aspect of social life generally taken for granted. In this section, both possible articulations of the rupture will be described, through the voices of the participants to the research.

The ‘visibility regime’ (Brighenti, 2010) of solidarity initiatives is usually interpreted by supporters as a way of doing politics on a daily basis and from the bottom-up, priming acts of ‘disruption’ that lead to reflecting on the political possibilities of a different world. The activism of affective rupture is expressed here. Most of the energies of those in solidarity are used to transform the structure of the dominant affective valences, usually composed of mistrust, suspicion, racism and hostility towards migrants within the affective landscape. The transformation of dominant affects can profoundly transform the way migrants and local community members experience citizenship and the forms of mutual care that concretise it. Those in solidarity, through their commitment, nourish the awareness that being directly involved certainly has public and political consequences that can be relatively controlled, made visible, and interpreted for those with whom they come into contact.

All of this has the potential to ‘convert’ politically hostile people, such as those belonging to xenophobic groups. This was the experience of Mattia and Alessio, a couple and legal tutors of unaccompanied foreign minors who also have friends that vote for and follow Fratelli d’Italia, the party that, together with Lega, Forza Nuova, Casa Pound, and other far-right parties, is one of the most hostile towards migration in the Italian context. Mattia and Alessio say,

The experience of Alessio and Mattia has opened a gash in the way of thinking of their friend, promoting reflexivity and profound transformation. Many participants recounted the ‘emotional conversion’ of someone who was hostile to migration, until they had the opportunity to meet a migrant. Many, but not enough, as Greta (host family) says, highlighting how this activity follows a path that is still very much uphill and does not benefit from the wider participation of the population. People engaged in migrant activism, particularly those who are engaged in family hosting, manifest a ‘way of life’ that some believe cannot be possible because of religious, cultural, and moral differences. Involving themselves in communal activities can radically change the ways of being involved. Natalia and Gabriel discuss their mindset going into their hosting experience, saying,

Such experiences and fractures in thinking are not unique to face-to-face situations, but are echoed within larger collective actions, such as rallies, protests, and marches. One’s intimate life and one’s affective life are in perfect continuity with the actions of social movements (Askins, 2015). What people engaged in solidarity enact is also, and above all, a public manifestation of their affective orientations, with the goal of spreading an empathetic attitude towards refugees. The eventual rupture and transformative reflexivity of encounters is consciously utilised by people engaged in solidarity and used in political advocacy.

However, part of the community may react to such initiatives with hostility and criminalisation towards solidarity (Lampredi, 2023b). In the case of people hostile to migration, the ruptures caused by solidarity initiatives are met with accusations of betrayal. Consolidated attitudes can reproduce and reaffirm themselves precisely when exposed to ruptures that are threatening them. Those who hinder the inclusion of migrants often denigrate the emotions of those who promote it and disparage them as those of ‘do-gooders’ or ‘false do-gooders.’ This is the classic rhetoric used by political parties and movements traditionally hostile to migration in Italy and Europe. Political forces hostile to migration have become defenders of (exclusive) national solidarity, reproducing the emotional bordering that distinguishes legitimate (internal) and illegitimate (external) solidarity. Violating the solidarity considered legitimate can in some cases be experienced as a violation of the hierarchies of values and priorities that constitute the political community. Solidarity with certain categories deemed unworthy of involvement, such as migrants, triggers recurring cycles of anger, indignation, and a sense of betrayal towards those who sympathise with them. It is a true criminalisation of solidarity (Tazzioli & Walters, 2019) and of the affections connected to it. However, this does not only concern clashes of a political, institutional, or mediatic nature. It also concerns the daily and intimate experience of those in solidarity. Activism is rarely independent of the intimate sphere of people. From this research, it emerges that those in solidarity must face environments that criminalise their commitment on a daily basis; the agents of criminalisation are sometimes people they are related to: parents, brothers and sisters, friends, partners and many others. This process is the intimate life of criminalisation (Lampredi, 2023b). The most situated and vernacular form of criminalisation, simultaneously intimate and political. This commitment also directly influences the affections people feel in their private life, and consequently leads to reflexively re-evaluating the people to whom they are most connected.

Monica, a humanitarian worker for Save The Children and an educator at MEDU, struggles to find adequate social recognition of her activities in her private life:

In some cases, acts of solidarity, even when performed by professionals with extensive experience like Monica, can be the subject of bitter conflict and delegitimization. Distancing oneself from one’s loved ones is a frequent phenomenon in those who are actively involved in forms of informal or professional solidarity. The disapproval from one’s loved ones is one of the factors that make those involved suffer the most.

These are the words of Giada and Simone, respectively an administrator of a mountain refuge and a medical doctor, who decided to move from Turin to a small town in order to get a house large enough to host unaccompanied foreign minors for as long as they are attending school. Simone's parents did not accept that their son, an established medical doctor, would give up his prestigious position to dedicate himself to this activity and ‘be satisfied’ with practising his profession as a village doctor. This type of exclusion is present in many types of relationships, such as between spouses, between parents and their children, between childhood friends. But also between acquaintances. Similarly, Margherita is accused of not being a ‘proper’ mother and of dedicating more time to migrants than to her own children.

The experiences of those in solidarity that have been collected and interpreted in this research confirm that being involved in the life of ‘outsiders’, such as migrants, means being accused of, more or less symbolic, betrayal. Being treated as traitors, having conflicts with loved ones, and giving up what has consolidated their lives over time is a risk that those in solidarity quickly learn to face. Being engaged in activities of solidarity makes it possible to bring out and make visible the ethical and political boundaries of some implicit rules of belonging, which if violated cause the ‘violators’ to be accused of not ‘properly’ treating people who should be given priority. This was the experience of Ginevra, whose activism and commitment was one of the reasons for her separation from her husband.

The conflict that Ginevra brings to our attention is the moral meaning of belonging. Bonding with those considered ‘outsiders’ can lead to a breakdown of other significant bonds with people who do not approve of such bonds, such as in the case of husband and wife. Getting involved in the life of a migrant highlighted some tacit ideas of Ginevra's husband that were not so defined and conscious before. Only when certain circumstances arise, what is tacit becomes visible and disruptive in what is taken for granted. But once this is visible, it erupts and resonates in everyday life, breaking and altering bonds.

All of these are experiences of disruption that we come across every day in the face of increasing social interdependence and differences. Sometimes these ruptures are reflexively interpreted and politicised, other times they are overcome in the most complete interpretative silence. In any case, they are processes that allow us to trace the unfolding of affectivity within the vastest of relational tangles. Affective rupture is a constitutive process of social and political life that allows for transformations or restorations. Each of our lives revolves around affective ruptures, both large and small, that occur on a daily basis. However, whether or not affective ruptures facilitate the transformation of one's ethical and political orientations is determined by how the ruptures are ‘articulated’ within the social fabric.

This essay highlights the intersection of emotions and citizenship in the experience of people engaged in migrant solidarity in Italy. Migration in Europe provokes political battles at every level of social experience, from the public and community one, to the intimate and private one. Emotions always manifest themselves, in different intensities, in movements, shifts, and irruptions in the ways in which individuals are involved. It is this that has allowed us to describe the ‘disrupting’ dimension of affectivity as practice that makes visible and transforms the moral boundaries that govern a political community. Affective involvement, especially when directed at those who are not fully legitimised, deemed unworthy, or criminalised, such as migrants, amplifies all of this. In these cases, acts of solidarity are acts of affective citizenship that bring the relational coordinates of common living into crisis. Solidarity is a citizenship in act (Schwiertz & Schwenken, 2020) that constitutes, interrupts, and critiques the way we are affectively involved in political issues, even when people react to this practice with increased hostility, anger, and accusations of betrayal. Affectivity is constitutive of the forms of care that challenge, preserve, or transform the logic of inclusion-exclusion upon which citizenship is based (Casas-Cortés, 2022).

The process described here shows how our emotions are performed and instituted in the concrete development of involvement, comprised of disruptions, interruptions, adjustments, and conflicts. This varies and intensifies according to the specific situation and according to the pluralities present in each society. Unforeseen events, ambiguities, and surprises are the concrete development of social life and can elicit, under certain conditions, turning points and social transformations on a larger scale. Interpreting emotions as phenomena of disruption, whether they are regulative or transformative, of the ways of interacting allows us to place emotions in complex relational entanglements in their concrete development. The experiences of solidarity I have analysed in this qualitative research show the continuous reflexive and interactive negotiation of affective conduct. In addition, affective ruptures have political resonance in the broader social web, producing visibilisation and politicisation of new ways of living and new ways of being We. For this reason, rather than identifying political emotions per se, the essay focused on the analysis of situations and episodes in which emotions acquire reflexivity and politicisation within particular social intertwining. For this, the situations and processes in which individuals are involved with care and commitment are important for understanding what is emotionally experienced.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Names of participants were changed throughout this article for privacy reasons. The information and consent forms provided to participants have been drawn up in accordance with the EU regulation 2016/679 relating to the protection of physical persons.