This special issue – stemmed from a three-year-research program funded by Università
Cattolica that provided encounters, reaserch networks and opened perspectives and
collaborations –1 starts from the assumption that migration is a historical and natural
phenomenon, but its definition is political, linked to the time frame and socio-economic
context, and influenced by the media, as the infrastructure that constitutes the world, in
material and symbolic ways. Today, both social interaction and cultural reproduction
pass through the media. Whether analog or digital, media contribute to the process of
construction of reality by people, as well as to the formation of shared imaginaries and
social representations. By suggesting to us what and how to think, old and new media –
together with a multiplicity of institutions, subjects, sources, tools and communicative
practices that coexist rather than replace each other – shape our common sense of the
world2. Sometimes fueling fear of the other and legitimizing its criminalization, sometimes
stimulating curiosity and empathy3 toward the other and the elsewhere
