ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on direct narrations that sheds light on the Mediterranean journey of Tunisian migrants and explores their lives during their stay in the reception and identification camp (RIC) in Cagliari during three weeks in April 2011. "Camp-like situations" are the new frontier of heterotopic studies that pay attention to the transformations in everyday life and to the state organisations engendered by the securitisation process. Migrants' vulnerability comes up against the governmentability; they are at the core of the process of "a model for conceptualizing power in its diffuse and multivalent operations, focusing on the management of populations, and operating through state and non-state institutions and discourses". The migrants who landed at Lampedusa are involved in these securitisation practices. The semi-coercive lifestyle in the RIC has common features with Goffman's concept of total institutions. In the analysis of Tunisian migrants' experiences, Foucault's concept of heterotopia is useful to highlight the complexities of migration life events.
