Paper short abstract:

My paper aims to show how, in a digital environment, members of a second-generation migrant organization participate to a creative, complex, negotiated, polyphonic building process of a collective public Self in the pursuit of legal and actual recognition by political institutions and civil society.

Paper long abstract:

In the last twenty years Italy is experiencing an unrelenting process likely to change from within the perception which the society has of itself and the sense of national unity painfully reached and perhaps not yet completed: Italy became a country of immigration and saw new social actors burst into the public sphere in search of recognition. Not only migrants who came in the eighties, but also the representatives of the so-called "second-generation" (young people who were born o had been living in Italy since they were child): both are today engaged in the construction of a public Self in the frame of citizenship, within the larger debate on migration and security issues carried on by media and Italian political parties (Schmidt-Palutan 2010).

My paper brings ethnographical data drawn from an ongoing fieldwork on a second-generation migrant organization (Rete G2, Seconde generazioni) which in 2005 set up a web site in order to connect young second-generation migrants spread all over Italy with the common goal of a reform of the current Italian Citizenship Law, from the jus sanguinis to the jus soli criterion. My contribute aims to show how, in the digital environment provided by the internet forum, each member of the organization participates to a building process - which is creative, complex, negotiated, polyphonic - of a collective public Self in the pursuit of legal and actual recognition by Italian political institutions and civil society.