Sense of belonging for children with a migration background

Blog post by Sara Amadasi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

In our Identities article, ‘Keeping two cultures together’: the binary construction of belonging in narratives of professionals on children’s cultural identity’, we investigated how the sense of belonging and cultural identity of children with a migration background[1] are socially constructed by Italian professionals who work at schools and in social services with young people. We also investigated whether narratives told by interviewees are affected by the gender of the children they are referring to.
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Our article is based on interviews conducted in the context of the Horizon 2020 project, ‘Child-Up: Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a Way of Upgrading Policies of Participation’. This project investigated the opportunities of children with a migration background to actively exercise their agency to change their social and cultural conditions. While the project involved several groups of people, our Identities article analyzed interviews conducted with teachers, educators, social workers and mediators in three cities in northern Italy.

In our analysis, we focused on the linguistic choices made by the interviewees in order to understand their sense of belonging and issues related to the cultural identities of the young people they work with. In the interviews, we saw that the sense of belonging of children with a migration background is frequently described in binary terms, for example, by counterposing ‘family’ to ‘school’, and ‘home’ to ‘outside home’, as places which represent different and bounded cultural worlds.
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This binarism is based on two established institutional discourses: the first is a developmental psychology discourse, while the second is based on the essentialization of culture and identity. Although the traditional idea of integration as adherence to an exclusive cultural model is commonplace when it concerns adults, when it relates to children it is based on the idea that they are still not fully formed individuals. Therefore, children’s ‘in-becoming’ condition would require a ‘cultural stability’.

This idea of ‘cultural stability’ implies two important issues: children are, most of the time, conceived as passive beings, unable to actively choose and act on the basis of contingent needs and conditions; and culture becomes a reified element which guides behaviours instead of being the product of people’s – and young people’s – linguistic and narrative choices. This interconnection between developmental and essentialist discourses has the effect of reinforcing pedagogical narratives which claims children have a universal need to adhere to a unique and exclusive cultural model. It also denies the vast range of possibilities that each individual has to create articulated, creative, and sometimes conflictual, personal stories about belonging.

In our article, we identified four domains through which professionals describe the sense of belonging of children with a migration background in binary terms. The first domain collects narratives that speak about cultural identities in terms of blocks. These kinds of narratives report an understanding of cultural difference conceived as boundaries and communicative barriers.

The second domain focuses on children’s sense of belonging through the lens of development. It therefore interprets young people as in-becoming individuals, stressing their alleged condition of incompleteness. In the third section, we highlight how the descriptions made about children’s cultural identities and sense of belonging relate to the interviewees’ need to present a certain version of their professional roles. Finally, the last domain we identified shows how the gender of children with a migration background impacts the narratives told by the professionals we interviewed.

Investigating and recognizing dynamics through which belonging and cultural identities are understood and described highlight problems with certain readings. According to literature and data, we claim that a binary understanding of belonging implies the risk of denying personal differences and human creativity. Both give different meanings to movement and change, as part of one’s own identity construction, and according to context and interactional conditions.

Moreover, binary readings of multifaced events such as migration and belonging reinforce understandings of national cultures in essentialist terms, supporting ideas of innate differences that override individuals' abilities to adapt to social situations and make choices and negotiations around their identities and interactional conditions. 

​[1] With the term ‘children with a migration background’, we refer to children who have personally experienced migration, those who have at least one parent who experienced it, and unaccompanied minors.

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Image credit: Photo by Kirill on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
​Amadasi, Sara & Ballestri, Chiara. (2024). ‘Keeping two cultures together’: the binary construction of belonging in narratives of professionals on children’s cultural identity. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2371719

Read further in Identities:

Constructions of self-identification: children of immigrants in Sweden   OPEN ACCESS

​Kinning as intimate disaster response: from recuperation in host families to educational migration of the Chernobyl children from Belarus to Italy

Rescuing children, reforming the Empire: British child migration to colonial Southern Rhodesia