Società e trasformazioni sociali 8 e-ISSN 2610-9689 | ISSN 2610-9085 ISBN [ebook] 978-88-6969-532-2 | ISBN [print] 978-88-6969-533-9 Peer review | Open access 11 Submitted 2021-08-31 | Accepted 2021-09-13 | Published 2021-10-27 © 2021 | cb Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution alone DOI 10.30687/978-88-6969-532-2/000 Stuck and Exploited Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Italy Between Exclusion, Discrimination and Struggles edited by Francesco Della Puppa, Giuliana Sanò Edizioni Ca’Foscari Edizioni Ca’Foscari Stuck and Exploited Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Italy between Exclusion, Discrimination and Struggles Francesco Della Puppa Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia Giuliana Sanò Università degli Studi di Messina, Italia Abstract Refugees and asylum seekers in Italy are ‘stuck’ because they ofen end up caught in the legal and social limbo of the reception system. The efects of the pandemic and lockdown measures to avoid transmission have stacked on top of these conditions. This scenario, along with the Italian policy field increases the vulnerabilisation of refu- gees and asylum seekers for their labour exploitation, but also create a space for media struggle, where political forces and social entrepreneurs clash and manipulate the issue of “asylum seekers”. This introductory chapter analyses these aspects, introducing the thematic lines of the volume and presenting its contribution. Keywords Refugees and asylum seekers. Italian Reception System. Forced (im)mo- bility. Exploitation. Social exclusion. Racial discrimination. Struggles. Summary 1 Introduction. – 2 Reception or Exclusion? – 3 Stuck and Exploited: A Model for Europe. – 4 Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the Storm of COVID-19 Pandemic. – 5 Structure of the Volume. 1 Introduction Representing the complexity of the Italian migration policies and re- ception system is a very challenging task. As the editors of this vol- ume, we discussed on many occasions the risks and possible conse-