Abstract
This thesis is based on a 6 month ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2019 in Riace, a small village located in Calabria, Italy. I explore resistance and refusal amongst pro-migrant activists within the governing ideology of immigration in Italy. By following my interlocutors around the village, and participating in different activities with the inhabitants, I seek to discuss the contemporary crisis the village goes through, through concepts such as collective memory, history and utopia, before landing in a political discussion about the governing political ideology in Italy, which also ended up influencing the inhabitants in Riace too. Having laid the context through the concepts mentioned, I discuss the topics of refusal, resistance, and hegemony to further examine the political dispute that figured between Riace and the political government in Italy.