Paola Rebughini

Different But Not Stranger: Everyday Collective Identifications among Adolescent Children of Immigrants in Italy

This article deals with the problem of the future of the second generation in Italy. After a brief overview of the main perspectives currently adopted to theorise the future of the second and subsequent generations, the Italian situation is introduced. Our objective is to see whether and how the observations made especially in contexts with a long tradition of immigration, where migration processes are now culturally and institutionally embedded, can be useful to understand the Italian situation, characterised by recent immigration flows. The empirical basis to the paper is a set of interviews and focus groups with 105 young people of migrant origin in Milan. Analysis of their narratives reveals six self-identifications which we describe as ethnic enclave, mimicry, crisis, transnational, hyphenated and cosmopolitan.

Friendship Dynamics Between Emotions and Trials

The aim of this article is to analyze friendship ties and the emotions connected to them in some particular phases of life: periods when subjects are faced with difficult challenges such as mourning, separation, job loss or illness. Under these circumstances, friendship ties and emotions take on exceptional intensity. To investigate these moments I will use the analytical concept of trial and I will outline its heuristic utility in the analysis of friendship ties. The article is based on a research project on the dynamics of friendship relationships among adults conducted in the urban area of the city of Milan. In order to shed light on the dynamics of friendship in difficult moments of life, the article is organized in three sections: in the first part, I will introduce some narratives collected during the research. In the second part, I will shed light on the way that trial phases of life are the periods in which the relation between friendship and emotions becomes more visible, in particular through the way that friendship bonds offer the possibility of narrating and sharing emotions themselves, thus introducing an element of reflexivity. In the third part, I will conclude by underlining the way that this kind of analysis of friendship ties can reveal some more structural dynamics of contemporary individualized society.

A generational attitude : young adults facing the economic crisis in Milan

Abstract For almost 10 years there has been talk of the economic crisis affecting the European area, with more evident effects in the Mediterranean countries. Yet the expression ‘economic crisis’ has become too wide and blurred to be useful for describing how the current socio-economic conjuncture is affecting different categories of young people in different ways. Precariousness and reduced job opportunities, with their consequences for social mobility, constitute only the more explicit and raw evidence of the lived experience of the crisis among young people. Although families remain the all-solving institution, the consequences of the crisis are diversified according to the economic, cultural and social capital of each individual, to gender and generation position, and to subjective and contextualized perceptions. This article presents research conducted to investigate how young people living in the urban area of Milan locate, react, readapt and reinvent themselves in the present economic context by analysing their aspirations, expectations and practices. We develop a comparative analysis of the main structural bias (gender, education, social class position) in order to shed light on the effects and perceptions of the crisis among young people in the city of Milan.

Critique and social movements: Looking beyond contingency and normativity

This article aims to confront the principal arguments of the concept of critique in sociology and to demonstrate the emergence in recent years of a re-dimensioned conception of critique, on the one hand, of a pragmatic, pluralistic and contingent nature, and, on the other, show how the need for a strong and transcendental concept of critique that does not renounce the possibility of individual and collective emancipation is still present. This article argues that the analytic and empirical space in which we can better observe the meeting between the contingent and normative aspects of critique is that of the social movements, that unsurprisingly have been important reference points for many of the different sociological traditions of critique.

Nuovi italiani. Forme di identificazione tra i figli di immigrati inseriti nella scuola superiore

New Italians. Forms of identification emerging from students with migrants origins in Italian higher schools - This article discusses the future of the second and third generations in Italy by developing a generational perspective. Through the adoption of a constructionist theoretical approach, informed by works on globalization and the new social movements, it tries to advance beyond the limits of theories and observations at time of fordism, based on concepts of either assimilation or integration. The paper presents an on-going research on students of foreign origins who attend high schools in Milan. By doing so, it focuses on the specificity of the Italian situation and it highlights new and innovative forms of identification, as they are changing alongside current ideas of belonging, membership, citizenship and difference. Hence, the actual experience of the second and third generations, and their new forms of identification, emerge as a useful starting point to understand some peculiarities of the contemporary world. Keywords: Second Generation, Social Movements, Social Integration, Immigration in Italy, Education.

Facing the Self-Government Test: Italian Youth and the Avatars of Neoliberalism

This chapter investigates the impact that neoliberalism has on the experiences and representations of ‘work’ among young Italians. Drawing on research conducted in the Italian city of Milan from 2013 to 2017, the chapter analyzes the transformations of the perceptions and experiences of work among young people from 18 to 30 years old. The aim is to shed light on the way in which this generation imagines, practices, and elaborates an experience of work in the current context of neoliberal policies, amid the growing importance of knowledge, emotions, and social relations in work processes typical of the ‘immaterial economies’, and in response to rapid changes in demands for skills and self-entrepreneurship. In its first section, the chapter analyzes some general characteristics of the transformations of the job market and job opportunities for young Italian people in the past decade, with specific attention to the exemplary case of Milan. In the second section, the chapter presents the empirical research conducted in that city, analyzing from a generational and intersectional point of view the experiences and the representation of work among the interviewees.

Embodied emotions between constructivism and ontologism: a reflection from the sociology of Alberto Melucci

This article investigates the issue of embodied emotions in social sciences, in a context characterized by increasing theoretical attention to overcoming the nature/culture dualism, but also by a growing dualism between constructivist and ontological approaches to emotions. We take as pivot of the analysis the way in which this topic has been debated by the Italian sociologist Alberto Melucci. The first section of the article locates the work of Melucci in the current debate on the ‘affective’ and ‘ontological’ turns with their impacts on the conceptualization of body and emotions. The second section focuses on the specificity of Melucci’s constructivist approach in comparison with current combinations of radical constructivism and ontological references at the basis of the ‘affective turn’, and highlights the role that Melucci gives to social movements as collective emotional experiences; the third section historicizes his fieldwork and theoretical approach, while the fourth section analyses how the issue of embodied emotions relates to Melucci’s conceptualization of action and subjectivation. Overall, the aim of this article is not to conduct a thorough cartography of sociological debate on emotions, nor to be a general overview of the sociology of Melucci; rather, it intends to highlight how Melucci’s approach to investigating emotions from collective action can furnish a different perspective on the current affective turn in social sciences.

Practices of Dignity and Respect: Children of Immigrants and Justness

This chapter discusses the concepts of dignity and respect in relation to the situation of the descendants of immigrants, the so-called ‘second generation’. The discussion will be based, on the empirical data of a research study carried out with the children of immigrants in Italy (Colombo and Rebughini 2012) and, on a theoretical reflection about the relation among the concepts of dignity, respect and justness. It will shed light on the practices of dignity, respect and justness carried out by social actors – in this case the children of immigrants – who can be involved in situations of discrimination, where their personal feelings of dignity are under threat.

Subject, Subjectivity, Subjectivation, between Autonomy and Ethics : Reply to the Commentaries

1 I would like to thank Maeve Cooke, Antimo Farro, Kevin McDonald and James Jasper for their insightful commentaries and for their contributions to the development of the debate on the topic of subject, subjectivity and subjectivation. I will briefly reply to the suggestions of each contribution, attempting to connect them, and to expand on the exploration of these theoretical concepts. Indeed, the four commentaries cover common ground in the considerations on subject, subjectivity and subjectivation as relational issues. In spite of their different perspectives and theoretical approaches, all the commentaries have drawn attention to the issue of ethical subjectivity in situated contexts of social relations, and the need to reflect on our contemporary idea of subjectivity as a ‘universal’ process. The commentaries highlight public space and especially social movements as privileged empirical fields in which we can search for new combinations of ethics and autonomy; this is possible only if these movements are able to overcome the dream of complete autonomy and total transparency – as in the ideal of direct democracy – in addition to the individualistic instrumental defence of exclusive interests and identities. Maeve Cooke emphasizes the topic of ethics as the core element of subjectivity, as the human capacity to pursue ideas and practices of a good life not only for oneself but also for other human beings, as well as for animals and the natural environment. We must not conceptualize this capacity as a transcendent moral quality, but as a political and practical issue, related to the positions, the experiences, the expectations and the imagination of single subjects. I agree when she claims that political theorizing should take ethical subjectivity seriously, avoiding any form of ‘epistemological authoritarianism’, but also avoiding the opposite reaction of the simple privatization of ethical concerns. As Habermas writes (Habermas, 1996), hyper-realism and any sort of natural determinism are at the basis of such authoritarianism and of its inability to acknowledge the role of discussion in public spaces. A situated idea of ethics and justness is certainly important in the theoretical reflection on subjectivity and subjectivation and it is also present in the debate on autonomy and emancipation as central elements of action and subjectivation processes. Ethics is not grounded in the subject as an isolated metaphysical entity, but in the individual as subject involved in situations, in social relations, in communication with the social and natural environment. We are not ‘monads without windows’ as Leibniz said, but always related to other living entities. Still, the inevitability of social relationships is in tension with the modern idea of autonomy and independence of the subject from power relations. Traditionally the idea of autonomy has not been developed as a generic struggle against constraints, but as a struggle against the power of some subjects over other subjects or as emancipation from ideology, mystification, and everything that keeps an individual in the Kantian condition of ‘self-incurred immaturity’. This interpretation of the autonomous subject has been exacerbated by the critical approach of poststructuralism, whose focus on the necessity of liberation has left the issue of ethics as a complement of Subject, subjectivity, subjectivation between autonomy and ethics: Reply to the commentaries

Framing Contexts and Actors

Theoretical insights into the children of immigrants are inevitably inspired by the empirical contexts in which they are elaborated: local, national, political, historic and linguistic features frame the way in which individuals and groups act and make their choices, but these empirical features influence theoretical interpretations too.