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Paper short abstract:

The present paper explores the contradictions of the reception system for unaccompanied migrant adolescents in Milan. It addresses the complex experience of being a young migrant in a community, the constraints and possibilities it entails, their agency skills, and the way educators relate to them.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on the ethnography of a host community for unaccompanied migrant adolescents in Milan, Italy. This field stands on the fall line of the social and political Italian rupture. The migrant adolescents welcomed in the communities are seen as fragile and traumatized, but also as a danger. The community in which I worked as an educator and ethnographer, for my doctoral research, is placed in a peripheral area, in south-east Milan (Calvairate-Corvetto), which makes the marginalization of migrants very clear.

The policies of the government and the municipality of Milan- under whose employ the host communities work- are about the management of the phenomenon and social integration. The resources they dispense, though, are insufficient. In this context of oppression, pedagogic ambivalence, and double bind with the families of origin, educators and guests find themselves dealing with everyday life.

I will describe the difficult position of the kids, pulled from many sides. But, above all, I will show their agency practices: how they create one's own experience of freedom, through disobedience, bordering on deviance, listening to shared music and practices of islamic religion. On the other hand, I will describe the daily tactics educators use to circumvent the system, by trying to offer them a path of personal and relational growth. I will argue that the free time spent together and the positive shared experiences are the real resource in the hands of educators and of the young adolescents, to resist external pressures and build meaningful life paths.