Llombardia: de l’emigració cap a Europa a l’allau d’immigrants extracomunitaris

Al llarg dels últims anys no només s’ha produït un augment de la població immigrant sinó, sobretot, un canvi radical en les seves característiques i procedència. Si a mitjan anys setanta nou de cada deu estrangers procedien de l’Europa comunitària o d’Amèrica del Nord, actualment només un de cada deu és comunitari o nord-americà, mentre que quatre són europeus extracomunitaris, dos són africans, dos són asiàtics i un és de l’Amèrica llatina. També cal tenir en compte que gairebé el 50% dels immigrants professen religions diferents de la cristiana i que una tercera part són musulmans

Here, there, in between, beyond…: Identity negotiation and sense of belonging among Southern Europeans in the UK and Germany

Whilst most of the research on intra-EU mobility has mainly focused on the reasons behind young Southern Europeans leaving their home countries, and secondly on their experiences within the new context, little is known about their sense of belonging and identities. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring Italian and Spanish migrants\u2019 social identity repositioning and the cultural change characterising their existential trajectories. Drawing on 69 semi-structured interviews with Italians and Spaniards living in London and Berlin, this article shows that the sense of belonging to one or more political communities and boundary work are related to individual experiences and can change due to structural eventualities such as the Brexit referendum. While identification with the host society is rare, attachment to the home country is quite common as a result of people\u2019s everyday experiences. Cultural changes and European/cosmopolitan identification are linked to exposure to new environments and interaction with new cultures, mostly concerning those with previous mobility experience, as well as to a sentiment of non-acceptance in the UK. However, such categories are not rigid, but many times self-identification and attachments are rather blurred also due to the uncertainty around the duration of the mobility project. This makes individual factors (gender, age, family status, employment, education) that are often considered as determinants of identification patterns all but relevant

The Macerata Shooting: Digital Movements of Opinion in the Hybrid Media System

The role of Twitter in the organisation of political action – either by supporting existing street-level protests or native digital mobilizations – has attracted a great deal of attention. However, the wider media, political, and cultural context in which mobilizations take place is often overlooked. In this article, we analyse the trajectory of a digital movement of opinion that reacted to the shooting of black people by a right-wing militant in the Italian town of Macerata in 2018. Using a dataset of 571,996 tweets captured over 31 days, and employing a mix of machine learning, network analysis and qualitative investigation, we study how factors both external and internal to the platform sealed the fate of that movement. We maintain that the permeability of Twitter to outer divided arenas and its re-intermediation by political leaders are key to the transformation of protest movements into polarised crowds

The Macerata Shooting: Digital Movements of Opinion in the Hybrid Media System

The role of Twitter in the organisation of political action – either by supporting existing street-level protests or native digital mobilizations – has attracted a great deal of attention. However, the wider media, political, and cultural context in which mobilizations take place is often overlooked. In this article, we analyse the trajectory of a digital movement of opinion that reacted to the shooting of black people by a right-wing militant in the Italian town of Macerata in 2018. Using a dataset of 571,996 tweets captured over 31 days, and employing a mix of machine learning, network analysis and qualitative investigation, we study how factors both external and internal to the platform sealed the fate of that movement. We maintain that the permeability of Twitter to outer divided arenas and its re-intermediation by political leaders are key to the transformation of protest movements into polarised crowds

The Lived Experiences of Migration: An Introduction

This editorial presents a general overview of the thematic issue “The Lived Experiences of Migration: Individual Strategies, Institutional Settings and Destination Effects in the European Mobility Process,” based on the rich qualitative data produced in the Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets (GEMM) project. The qualitative component of the project focused on the ‘lived’ experiences of migration. The main contribution of the articles in this issue is to demonstrate the multiplicity of actors and structures involved in the migration process, and to recognize the important role that space plays in the life-trajectories of people on the move. Perceiving the migration process as a learning experience allows for a deeper look into the complex renegotiation of cultural and political boundaries that migrants experience in the destination

Post‐Migration Stress: Racial Microaggressions and Everyday Discrimination

In 1991, Philomena Essed highlighted the importance of studying contemporary racism, focusing on the interplay between the macro‐social dimension and its constant reactivation in everyday interactions. Later, psychologists redefined the pervasive experience of racism in everyday encounters in terms of racial microaggressions. Migrants and asylum seekers today constitute “ideal” candidates for this kind of experience. This is due to the persistent historical processes that harken back to Western colonialism and imperialism, as well as the growing hostility towards people migrating from the Global South. This hostility has been brewing for several decades in Western countries, and it manifests in both everyday informal interactions and institutional contexts, where migrants and asylum seekers constantly face racist attitudes

“I’m Told I Don’t Look Like a Foreigner”: Everyday Racism in Contemporary Italy

In our article, we aim to explore the experience of everyday racism of young people with migrant parents in Italy. Drawing on the analysis of 20 interviews, we seek to reconstruct the overall dynamics of racial microaggressions, highlighting how the context in which microaggressions occur and the interplay between ethnic background, gender, and somatic features influences the interpretations and reactions of the victims. We highlight the boundary work and identity negotiation process carried out in everyday encounters. We also show that participants’ experience oscillates between the claim of not-taken‐for‐granted citizenship, the feeling of being confined within ethno‐cultural imaginaries, and the experience of overt manifestations of racism. Finally, we highlight both the process by which victims come to recognise racial microaggressions and the obstacles they face in coping with them

Governing through security? Institutional discourse, practices, and policies in the metropolitan city of Milan

In our paper, we aim at pointing out the way the most relevant institutional actors currently define the security agenda for the Milanese metropolitan area, which kind of goals they try to pursue, upon which instruments and resources they can rely, which division of labour and forms of cooperation they try to putting into practices. We draw from an analyses of both official documents by the main public institutions involved in the governance of security in Milan and semi-structured interviews to all the members of the Comitato provinciale per l’ordine pubblico e la sicurezza – a board that gather the president of the province, the mayor of the province capital (plus mayors of other cities and towns of the province who can be involved on an ad hoc basis), the representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Prefetto), the District Attorney and the chiefs of all the national police forces – as well as to politicians, civil servants and commissioners of the local police of the city of Milan. We illustrate how discourses and practices of in/security have contributed to the construction of the city as place exposed to a multiplicity of risks that local authorities and police forces are expected to manage. Furthermore, we highlight how the diffusion and legitimization of an ‘ideology of safety’ has turned the demand to live in safe communities into an attempt to legitimize exclusionary practices insofar as discourses on security were strictly interconnected with discourses on cultural identity and, focusing on both the (imagined) community repertoire and the us/them opposition, ended up legitimizing a racialized urban governance of inclusion and exclusion. Finally, we try to show that a recent attempt, by the new centre-left government, to modify such an approach is generating ambiguous and controversial results and is paradoxically promoting an even stronger securitization of urban policies, spaces and life through more democratically oriented governmental practices

Public drunkenness as a nuisance in Ghent (Belgium) and Trento (Italy)

This article explores the reality of the nuisance of public drunkenness in one nightlife location of Ghent (Belgium) and in one of Trento (Italy) and inspects the way alcohol-related disorder is viewed and tackled by police officers there. Drawing on the literature arguing for the existence of different "cultures of drinking" in western and southern European countries, a distinct reality of the nuisance of public drunkenness was hypothesized to be present in these two cities. Against the backdrop of cultural criminology scholarship and of the national literature on policing practices, it was expected that the physical/aesthetic appearance of street drinkers would differently impact on the way police officers there represent alcohol-related disorder and enforce national and local nuisance regulations. The gathered data indicate that while drinking patterns and connected disorderly behavior do not significantly vary in Ghent and in Trento, the aesthetic/physical characteristics of certain groups of people play a role in shaping the representations of some police officers in Trento. The study concludes that cultural and context-specific factors, including those linked to the cultures of drinking and to aesthetics, should be considered in criminological research to more fully understand and explain the different policing views on and attitudes to alcohol-related disorder in inner-city nightlife areas. In its conclusions, the article also highlights some directions for future research