THE POLITICS OF BELONGING AND YOUTH WORK IN MILAN

The thesis examines the role of youth work—understood as a form of non-formal socio-educational practice—in the everyday lives of young people with a migration background in the city of Milan. It investigates the role of this actor in the construction, suspension, or renegotiation of the criteria of national belonging within the socio-educational spaces in which it operates (Youth Centres). Starting from an urban and media context marked by the growing stigmatization of young people with a migration background—frequently represented as “illegitimate” subjects or as individuals to be “sent back”—the research mobilizes Bourdieusian concepts to position itself at the intersection of youth work studies and analyses of the politics of belonging. By conceptualizing the nation as a field traversed built on dominant criteria of belonging, the thesis employs the concept of the politics of belonging to investigate how such criteria are reproduced, delegitimized, or reformulated within non-formal educational spaces. Drawing on a Bourdieusian-inspired analytical framework and a qualitative methodology, youth work is examined as a specific position within the educational field, characterized by an unequal distribution of educational and symbolic capital and by a historically constituted professional habitus. At the empirical level, the research first explores the dispositions and expectations structuring the habitus of youth workers—particularly the asymmetry of recognition, the relational disposition, and the aspiration to social justice—showing how these elements shape a solidaristic posture towards young people. Second, the analysis of everyday interactions within Youth Centres makes it possible to identify practices of belonging-work, through which youth workers tend to suspend the use of national criteria of judgement, promoting instead a normative horizon of singularity centred on individual life projects. However, this delegitimization of national categories appears as ambiguous and situated, as such categories re-emerge in more indirect or subtle forms in specific interactional contexts. Finally, by giving voice to the lived experiences of young people with a migration background, the research analyses the plural forms of belonging experienced within Youth Centres, relating them to experiences of exclusion and stigmatization encountered in the wider urban and social space. Taken as a whole, the research contributes to an understanding of youth work as a space for the negotiation of national belonging, highlighting both its critical potential vis-à-vis dominant criteria and its structural tensions and contradictions.