‘I’m Italian and I’m other’. Citizenship in the Making among Second Generation High School Students in Rome

The current debate on citizenship acknowledges the importance to adopt a microsociological perspective for understanding the transformation of citizenship in a context of international migration and mobility. This perspective does not want to dismiss the cruciality of legal citizenship as a set of rights and privileges, obligations and allegiance, but complements it with the notion of “lived citizenship” focused on the ways in which social actors live, act and practice citizenship in their everyday lives (Lister et al., 2007). This notion is particularly relevant when applied to younger generations and migrants, as subject that particularly experience the mismatch between different dimensions of citizenship, thus constituting a fruitful empirical ground to study citizenship in its making. Drawing on this framework, our study presents preliminary results of a research on second generation students in Rome high schools. The choice of this target derived from the crucial role of education in promoting citizenship and inclusion. Particularly in the Italian context, the universal school system offers one the first and most significant connections with the local community to children with a migration background and their families. Nonetheless, the school is a locus where intercultural conflicts become more evident as inequalities triggered by a migration background may create “unequal diversities” (Portes and Zhou, 1993) and “subaltern integration” (Ambrosini, 2011). On these bases, our study aims at understanding: how student with a migration background perceive and interpret themselves; the kinds of attachments they maintain with their parents’ homeland; the obstacles they meet in their daily life; their expectations and perspectives for the future; the resources they may use to confront racism, marginalization, and other obstacles; and the actual social relations and practices in which they engage. For data collection we used focus groups with students of different ethnic backgrounds. This tool was particularly suited as it helped many of our interviewees to activate reflexivity and discuss freely of sensitive issues thanks to group support and reassurance in a peer conversation setting. A non-directive interviewing protocol encouraged also a lively conversation allowing for differentiated perspectives to emerge. The field research is still ongoing. To date, 4 focus groups have been conducted, involving 42 students from about 15 different national backgrounds. The preliminary results show heterogeneous experiences of integration and identity formation. They also reveal that citizenship is constructed in a negotiated and dialogical process that involves both second generation youngsters and “autochthone” peers and adults. At the same time, different trajectories of inclusion can be identified leading to integration (“for love” or “for force”), but also separation, marginalization or assimilation (Berry, 2006).