The Right to Be Transnational: Narratives and Positionings of Children with a Migration Background in Italy

This chapter presents a social system and an interactional theoretical approach to explore how theorising children in sociology has moved beyond mere interest in children’s `voice’ to one where children practice agency and contribute to the structuring of social systems. The article explores how children with migrant background play with narratives of transnational mobility, claiming a sort of transnational citizenship. Reflecting on how children's citizenship and rights relate, and how are affected by transnational mobility, allows to focus on children's active participation in social processes. Through Positioning theory and interaction analysis applied to video-recorded extracts of workshops, we aim to explore the resources children activate in the interaction to deal with their travelling experiences and to construct and negotiate their identities inside the group in an institutional setting

Block and thread intercultural narratives and positioning: conversations with newly arrived postgraduate students

This paper considers how, in the process of positioning that is implicit in every interaction, all of us employ multiple and often competing narratives when we talk about cultural identity and our relationships with new cultural environments. In interviews with newly arrived postgraduate students about their experience of travelling to study abroad, the students employ competing block and thread narratives. Block narratives represent an essentialist discourse of culture. As such, they are easily converted into cultural prejudice by blocking the possibility for understanding and sharing at the point of tolerating an Other who can never be like ‘us’. These are default narratives because of the way in which we are brought up in our societies within a global positioning and politics. Thread narratives instead support a critical cosmopolitan discourse of cultural travel and shared meanings across structural boundaries that act against cultural prejudice. Threads need to be nurtured as alternative forms of engagement. Therefore, there is a place for the researchers to intervene with their own thread narratives. This intervention is both allowed within and supported by an understanding that researchers join with their participants in the creative intercultural events of the interview

‘I already have a culture.’ Negotiating competing grand and personal narratives in interview conversations with new study abroad arrivals

In an interview with a postgraduate student about her intercultural experience of recently arriving for study abroad, it was found that the two researchers and the student were engaged in a mutual exploration of cultural identity. The in- terview events became conversational and took the form of small culture formation on the go in which each participant employed diverse narratives to project, make sense of and negotiate expression of cultural identity. The stu- dent shifted between personal narratives drawn from her particular cultural trajectories and splintered from grand narratives of nation and global position- ing, between non- essentialist threads and essentialist blocks. The researchers learned from her and intervened to facilitate shifts to non-essentialist threads, drawing on narratives from their own personal cultural trajectories, but some- times also falling into essentialist blocks splintered from grand narratives. The roles of ideology and competing essentialist and non-essentialist discourses of culture were implicit in these negotiations, as were the personal agency of the student as she responded to the constraining conflicts, structures and hierarchies encountered through the events she spoke about. Rather than providing a picture of intercultural assimilation and integration, interculturality is revealed as a hesitant and searching negotiation, sometimes of vulnerability, wrong-footedness and occasional assault on identity

Bambini in viaggio nel presente. Narrazioni di mobilità transnazionale a scuola

In the last decade a meaningful number of children with a migration background has been included in Italian schools. In including these children, schools have faced major changes, including the activation of courses for learning Italian as a second language and the management of periods of absence of those children who have temporal return experiences to their – or their family's – countries of origin during the school year. These trips represent both a relevant event for the school, introducing a break in the school system that reveals social changes of great interest to social sciences, and a relevant field of investigation in the study of children. This paper aims to address both these issues. While the studies that refer to the more traditional developmental psychology interpret these transnational experiences as disadvantageous for the child and for his/her identity formation, recent migration studies tend to look at children's international mobility as a resource to acquire a special ability to move between different cultural identities and for the development of intercultural or multicultural identity. In both cases, however, it is possible to recognize, on the one hand, a still dominant conception of the child as "in-developing subject", which builds an image of children as passive recipients of cultural and social influences and, on the other, an essentialist approach applied to the concepts of identity and culture. In line with the epistemological break with the more traditional developmental psychology introduced by the new sociology of childhood and adopting a non-essentialist perspective, this PhD work, based on a one year research conducted in two Italian schools, will investigate the process through which children actively participate in the interaction and, therefore, in the generation of meanings related to their travel experiences and how the teachers for their part give meaning to these transnational mobility experiences involving students. In particular, positioning theory, analysis of interactions and analysis of narratives, applied to data collected through audio-video recordings of interactions with children aged 7 to 15 and interviews with 19 teachers and a focus group conducted with some of them, will allow to observe narratives and interactional practices through which participants show their active participation in the construction of meanings related to transnational mobility as well as, more generally, in social processes.Nell'ultimo decennio un significativo numero di bambini e bambine con background migratorio è stato inserito nelle scuole italiane. L'inclusione di questi studenti ha portato la scuola a doversi confrontare con importanti cambiamenti, tra cui l'attivazione di corsi per l'apprendimento dell'italiano come seconda lingua e la gestione di periodi di assenza da parte di quei bambini che effettuano viaggi di ritorno al paese di nascita loro o dei loro genitori durante l'anno scolastico. Questi viaggi rappresentano sia un momento rilevante per la scuola, introducendo una rottura nel sistema scolastico che lascia intravedere cambiamenti sociali di grande interesse per le scienze sociali, sia un campo di indagine per lo studio dei bambini. Il presente lavoro si propone di affrontare entrambi questi temi. Se da un lato gli studi che fanno riferimento alla più tradizionale psicologia dello sviluppo interpretano questi viaggi come svantaggiosi per il bambino e per la sua formazione identitaria, dall'altro i recenti studi sulle migrazioni tendono a evidenziare la possibilità che il viaggio darebbe a questi soggetti di sviluppare una particolare capacità di movimento tra differenti identità culturali o di farsi portatori di identità interculturali o multiculturali. In entrambi i casi tuttavia è possibile riconoscere, da un lato, una concezione ancora dominante del bambino come “soggetto in divenire”, che costruisce un'immagine di quest'ultimo come passivo di fronte ad influenze culturali e sociali e, dall'altra, un approccio essenzialista applicato ai concetti di identità e cultura. In linea con la rottura epistemologica introdotta dalla nuova sociologia dell'infanzia rispetto alla più tradizionale psicologia dello sviluppo e adottando una prospettiva non-essenzialista, il presente lavoro, basato su una ricerca di un anno condotta in due scuole italiane, intende indagare il processo attraverso cui i bambini partecipano attivamente alla generazione di significati relativi alle loro esperienze di viaggio e come le insegnanti dal canto loro diano significato alla mobilità transnazionale che coinvolge gli studenti. In particolare, la positioning theory, l'analisi delle interazioni e l'analisi delle narrazioni, applicate al materiale raccolto attraverso audio-video registrazioni di interazioni con bambini dai 7 ai 15 anni e interviste con 19 insegnanti e un focus group svolto con alcune di loro, consentiranno di osservare le narrazioni e le pratiche interazionali attraverso cui i partecipanti mostrano la loro partecipazione attiva non solo nella generazione di significati relativi al viaggio, ma, più in generale, all'interno dei processi sociali

Dialogic negotiations of children’s narratives in classroom workshops

This article investigates how dialogic negotiations contribute to the enhancement of pupils’ epistemic authority. The analysis was based on two interactions collected in a primary school and a higher secondary school in Italy, as part of a European research project promoting dialogue-based activities. The aim of the research was to investigate children’s agency and participation in changing their social and cultural conditions of hybrid integration. Their participation was promoted in different ways to facilitate dialogue, which enhanced dialogic negotiations and narrative interlacement. The analysis demonstrates that, through dialogic negotiations, children and adults shape the meanings of children’s personal stories together and create a network of interlaced narratives. Both these conditions impact on children’s participation in knowledge production and identity construction