ABSTRACT
This third ethnographic chapter revolves around the notion and role of solidarity in migration struggles. I chart the coming together of the Boats4People campaign in 2012 that protested the mass dying in the Mediterranean Sea and led to encounters with Tunisian parents whose children had disappeared in the attempt to cross the sea. With help of Sara Ahmed’s writing, I explore these complex embodied encounters between people situated in different ‘life worlds’ and probe what forms of collective struggle may emerge from them. What began with Boats4People as a (failed) attempt to actively intervene in the Mediterranean turned into the Alarm Phone in 2014, an activist network able to support tens of thousands of people while in distress at sea. In these direct but rather unembodied encounters, a form of solidarity materialised between individuals who were, and often remained, unknown to one another. The embodied and unembodied encounters of Boats4People and the Alarm Phone are conceived as underwritten by a form of resistance that expresses itself through migratory solidarity.
