Ilenya Camozzi

Practices of Difference: Analysing Multiculturalism in Everyday Life

The considerations we wish to make here arise from a profound dissatisfaction with the current debate on multiculturalism. We perceive that there is a growing gap between the main ways of reading and interpreting the presence of difference in contemporary society and what we see, hear and at times experience in our fieldwork. We are comforted by the fact that in recent times various authors, representing a range of different intellectual perspectives and academic environments, have taken a similar stance, lamenting the lack of reciprocal intertwining between theories and studies (Baumann 1999; Beck 2004; Sarat 2002; Wise 2006).

(Re) Creating the Time-Space of the City. Young Cosmopolitans and Everyday Practices

The article explores the relationship between time-space experience and creativity, focusing on the everyday practices and strategies used by young people to tackle the contemporary processes of acceleration and compression of urban times and spaces. The dimensions of time and space are proposed in an explorative way, in order to investigate the fertility of the concept of creativity in sociological debate. The proposal is based on qualitative research conducted in Milan on young cosmopolitans (PhD students, artists and designers) who were temporarily living in the city to further their studies.

Mediterranean racisms. Connections and complexities in the racialization of the Mediterranean region

book textand data-heavy without providing some of the additional layers of nuance and complicated meanings that this rich data, as I know first-hand, can evoke. I was also disappointed at how often her data excerpts contained inaudibles; careful notes and quick transcription should make this problem far less frequent for a qualitative researcher than was apparent in her text. Finally, there were numerous instances when she refused to trust her participants, or misrepresented their meaning (which had been provided verbatim on a previous page). There were also many places where she seemingly failed to follow up on the meanings provided by participants. I often wrote things like, “Why didn’t she ask them?” and “What about the comment he made on the previous page?” in the margins as I read. To be clear – I trust her critiques of the neighborhood and of their way of “doing” diversity. But as a careful reader, I found this confusing, and I fear that these gaps and mismatches could undermine her arguments. That said, Behind the White Picket Fence is a worthy addition to the growing literature on neighborhood integration and diversity discourses. It will be of interest to urban sociologists, critical race scholars, and those who study discourses and their connection to social inequalities. These critiques of the failings of our diversity discourse and of the racial power dynamics in diverse spaces are necessary for social change, and Mayora-Gallo succeeds with that and more in this important contribution.

The strength of memory and the weakness of recognition: Italian associations in Germany

ABSTRACT From a sociological perspective, the interplay between time and migration processes has long been overlooked. Yet time and temporalities represent a strategic dimension when it comes to investigating multicultural societies and the complexity of intercultural relations. This article has two aims: in terms of theory, it sets out to explore the link between memory and recognition as a strategic nexus for investigating multicultural contexts, while the empirical component analyses whether and in what ways the social and collective memory of Italian associations in Germany hinders their attempts to gain recognition. Most of the existing associations now appear to be converging towards a collective memory based on a hyper-idealized image of the homeland, combined with nostalgic sentiment, reinforcing an ethnicity-based identity which gives rise to a process of “folklorization” of cultural differences. This scenario affects processes of self- and hetero-recognition.