Interculturality in the Making: Out-of-home Children Familiarizing with Ethnographic Research in Italian Residential Care

From its early beginning, anthropology has dealt with the unavoidably necessity of understanding the research experience as one (within many) intercultural occurrence. Particularly, the ethno-graphic line within children’s studies has depicted the research experience in methodological and epistemological terms, promoting the adoption of an age- and culture-sensitive approach. Far from being inconsequential, this intercultural reflexive competence is required to research agents as well. Drawing on my Ph.D ethnographic research and focusing on two Italian residential care facil-ities, in this chapter I analyze children’s repertoire of (discursive and behavioral) activities when dealing with research – its practices and tools – as locus of intercultural knowledge negotiation and co-construction. Within ethnographic pen-to-paper fieldnotes and conversational transcripts com-ing from video-recorded dinnertime interaction, children’s repertoire emerges as an overall activi-ty of “familiarization”, i.e., aimed at “making the Other familiar”, as in any intercultural encoun-ter. Particularly, with this repertoire children display to intertwine their multiple cultural assump-tions – relying on their peer cultures as well as on their common home cultures shared with adults –, and personal concerns – reflecting over the boundaries between public and private spheres. In so doing, they co-construct the research as an intercultural environment relying on discursive and ma-terial artifacts that need to be “talked into being”, enlarging its aims and processes.