Other ‘lenses’: a training programme for social workers and others working with asylum seekers and migrants in Italy

The article describes the approach adopted in VeSTA, a training project in Piedmont (north-west Italy), funded by the EU's Fund for Asylum, Migration and Integration (FAMI 2014–2020). The aim of the project was to provide training for social workers and others professionals working with refugees and other migrants, and strengthen the network linking up these various actors. Our theoretical approach stresses the importance of asylum seekers’ social networks, and the legal, institutional and discursive constraints structuring their lives, in order to provide a framework for understanding choices and attitudes of residents of reception centres, as well as those of other migrants. Drawing on research on migration and on media production, we encouraged participants in the training sessions to analyse migrants as ‘social actors’, rather than interpreting their behaviour and needs in terms of ‘their culture’. A particularly innovative part of the project was the involvement of 16 migrants as ‘experts in the relationship with the social services’, who participated with lecturers in certain sessions, in a participatory action approach.