Dr Maggie Neil

Maggie Neil’s work focuses on alternatives to state models of care and welcome in border and displacement settings. She received her PhD in Development Studies from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation is a reconsideration of the classical Anthropological and Refugee Studies theme of hospitality, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Sicilian borderlands. Maggie also holds an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Humanities from Yale University. She has worked for the UN, the Open Society Foundations, and grassroots NGOs. She is fluent in French and Italian. 

Maggie’s PhD research ethnographically traced informal practices of welcome and hospitality in displacement contexts in Sicily, at Europe’s southern border. She conducted field research at ports of disembarkation, in official reception centres in the hinterlands, in self-settlements for migrant farmworkers in rural agricultural areas, and in urban Palermo. Across these sites, she explored what efforts at welcome meant in the lives of both ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’. Her research opens theoretical avenues for reconsidering a classical theme, as well as for practitioners to reflect on the effects, limits, and potential of a hospitality ethos. 

As the Pedro Arrupe Research Fellow, Maggie is exploring how mothering and faith-based aid work change in contexts of receding state protection for migrants. She is interested in understanding how these may be considered political practices of care. 

Interests: hospitality, care, protection, homemaking, gender, the state, borders, displacement, the Mediterranean

Neil, Margaret. 2024. ‘“We Welcome Migrants and the Tourists Come”: Postmodern Hospitality in Palermo, Sicily’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI). doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14093

Neil, Margaret and Federica Cerruti. 2024. ‘A South Of/Within the South: Race, Caporalato, and the ‘Southern Question’ Renewed in Contemporary Italian Border-Making’. Modern Italy. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2024.18

Neil, Margaret and Sean Wyer. 2023. ‘“Sicily Can Be Very Seductive”: The White Lotus and the Transnational “Making” of the Mediterranean’. The Italianist.DOI: 10.1080/02614340.2023.2256064