Giorgia Mirto

Giorgia Mirto

Giorgia Mirto is a researcher and anti-racist militant from Sicily, Italy. She has spent the past 11 years researching Italian procedures related to the management of the bodies of migrants who died in the Mediterranean. She pursued this political and intellectual endeavor contributing to the creation of the official-based Border Death Database at VU University in Amsterdam. With the Mediterranean Missing Project at the University of York, Giorgia investigated both the impact on families of having a relative missing, and the law, policy and practice around the identification of bodies of dead migrants in Italy. Accompanying the ICRC as a consultant, Giorgia participated in a pilot study to identify the victims of the largest shipwreck known, April 18, 2015. Giorgia then supported family members of the missing and their collectives in the process of seeking truth by accompanying them in the search and standing by their side in the struggles. This led her to question what it means to memorialize the death of migrants. In 2018, she won a research grant at the University of Bologna to study Italians' beliefs, attitudes and behaviors regarding death and dying. To analyze how Italian funerary practices are translated toward the subsumption of those who die in the Mediterranean and the political role of the dead migrants’ bodies., Giorgia is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York.