This paper engages with the narratives of British-Bangladeshi young women in UK Higher Education around their ethnic, religious and national identities to shed light on the multiple meanings of these identities and on the range of factors and processes that inform them. Research on minority ethnic identities indicates that while holding a positive conception of one’s ethnicity contributes to individuals’ well-being, those of minority ethnic origins experience tensions as their ethnic identity is attributed lesser value in mainstream social and institutional settings such as schools and workplaces (Phinney, 1990; Yip, 2016). In the UK, this has been compounded by the policy shift from a multicultural approach to the promotion of shared British values and community cohesion that has taken place over the last two decades (Home Office, 2001; Kundnani, 2002; McGhee, 2003). Within this context, policy and media representations of Muslim communities and identities have portrayed them as particularly problematic, which has been reflected in widespread perceptions of Islamic values and practices as antithetic to those embodied by ‘British society’ (Casey, 2016; YouGov 2019).

This paper draws on qualitative research with 21 young women of British-born Bangladeshi background who attended university in London to explore the significance and the meanings that these women attributed to their ethnic, religious and national identities, and how they are shaped by participation in education. The research used in-depth interviews and photo-elicitation techniques, where participants were asked to take or select a picture which represented what it meant for them to be Bangladeshi, British and Muslim. The data were analysed through a Bourdieusian conceptual lens combined with an intersectional perspective, considering the multiple fields that these women engaged in and how the mutual interplay of class, ethnicity, religion and gender informed their outlooks and practices.

The findings reveal that the significance and the meanings that these women attribute to their ethnic, religious and national identities are variable, experientially informed and relationally constructed. They evidence the complex identity work that these women are involved in as they navigate their multiple belongings. In this process, existing representations of what it means to be Bangladeshi, British and Muslim are taken up, contested and negotiated, and the boundaries and content of these categories are redrawn. Participants’ stories show that intersecting racialised and classed hierarchies of status and stereotypes of those of Bangladeshi and South Asian origins can lead to self-distancing from one’s ethnic background. Yet, participation in HE can favour a re-evaluation and assertion of minority ethnic identities through exposure to new and valued interpretative repertoires of what it means to be Bangladeshi, which enables symbolic re-signification. Islam also functions as a framework through which multiple inequalities are contested and challenged. It provides a source of identity that is constructed at the same time as alternative to identification as British where this is perceived to entail racialised hierarchies of power and as progressive.

In this article, we sociologically analyze the Italian school context as a place of socialization through the lens of “civic education” when the refugee minors are the recipients. In this specific and narrow scope, we ask whether civic education, including “the founding values of the EU”, which is compulsory in all school orders in Italy as of A. A. 2020/2021, turns into a desired sociality (following Mead's symbolic interaction) between refugee minors and the "host" society or, following what the radical interaction approach (Athens, 2017) suggests, it leans more toward the dynamics of power and domination between the parties involved in its implementation. We do so by drawing on in-depth policy analysis and qualitative data collected as part of the Erasmus + project "Continugee" on the schooling of refugee minors in several European countries through semi-structured interviews and focus groups with teachers (in some cases with refugee backgrounds), refugee minors, and social workers in shelters who follow up-even informally-the minor’s schooling in different Italian regions. Results show that civic education, particularly regarding European values, can become a litmus test to comprehend how migration and asylum are institutionally conceived. In line with what previous research (Dryden-Peterson, 2020) illustrated, refugee minors and their stories are excluded from national and European imaginaries while included formally in national education systems. In such exclusion, civic education towards refugees, rather than an inclusive educational response based on a relational approach, becomes a tool through which nation-state-based values and needs are reproduced.

This contribution highlights the intertwining between social reproduction and change in the biographies of Fatima and Sadia, two Afrodescendant teachers, whose paths allow the analysis of their experiences with an intersectional approach (Crenshaw et. al., 2013; Collins, 2019), as they are subjects characterized by the intersection of structural factors, in this case gender (women), race (two different kinds of blackness) and middle-low social status.

While structural factors are usually seen mainly as constraints that reproduce social inequalities (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1972), however, these women turn their intersectionality into a kind of advantage, fighting victimization, as they make these factors the focus in their engagement for social change. This latter aspect has been under-emphasized in the literature, which has mainly focused on the constraints, especially with respect to migrant women, although there have been some studies highlighting their agency in charting their own trajectories (Al-deen, 2019; Romito, 2021).

Using this interpretative framework, this contribution addresses the following research question: how does the biographical approach explore the intersection between structural factors and social change in the biographies of two Afrodescendant teachers in Italy?

To answer this question, a qualitative methodology is used, in particular the biographical method (Lahire, 2016; Apitzsch, 2015), which develops in depth, from a socio-historical perspective, the contribution of migratory capital and its role within private and public education. In particular, biographical portraits of racialized women are built, allowing us to narratively interpret how their common features of teachers and black women in the Italian education system make their different educational spaces transformative ones, firstly through their presence. With these portraits, it is also possible to analyse how these teachers, who are active in education in different ways, reflect on their biographical trajectories, from their youthful upbringing to transition to adulthood. Below are two extracts from these biographical portraits:

Fatima, a religious activist of Moroccan origin who arrived in Italy as a teenager, recounts her experience of university education in northern Italy and her commitment against the religious illiteracy of women and children as a teacher of Islamic religion in a mosque.

Sadia, teacher and writer of Somali origin, after a complex period due to her illness, in 1993 passed the teaching competition: to date she has been teaching in primary schools for almost 30 years. She also continues to pursue her passion for writing, as a tool for change.

By investing in both public and private education systems, Fatima chooses to positively overturn gender constraints in Islam to find in girls’ and children’s education the autonomy that leads to the professionalisation of the teaching and leadership roles.

Sadia, instead, starts from the constraints of disability, colonial past, and blackness to personally define herself primarily as a teacher and writer, using her positionality to change the representation of Black Italian women.

In conclusion, this proposal aims to contribute not only theoretically, but especially methodologically, as biographical portraits aim to emphasize how these women manage their social constraints and make them the core of their engagement, focused especially on education.

Literature largely documents how, in contemporary Italian society, myths of ethnoracial homogeneity have driven a division between a monolithic national ‘self’ and ‘the others’, foreigners, who comprise both first generation migrants and their Italy-born descendants (Marinaro and Walston 2010; Pesarini and Tintori 2020). However, only few research works focus on the specific ways in which young Italian people with a migration background can claim belonging in their everyday interactions (Sarli 2023; Frisina and Agyei Kyeremeh 2022).

This paper presents the participatory research action we carried out within some secondary schools in Parma. On the one hand, the research process aimed at examining how racialized young people react to exclusionary behaviours, and how such reactions are influenced by their surrounding discoursive environment. On the other, it intended to explore collectively the possible ways in which processes of difference reproduction can be challenged in everyday interactions.

Key in this work is the concept of “boundary events” (Twine 1996): everyday life encounters (Wilson 2017) in which, through the interaction between the subjects involved, social boundaries become evident and can be reiterated or contested.

The research process consisted of two stages. First, through focus groups with young people of migrant descent, we collected narrations of boundary events, with special focus on those occurred at school. Attention was paid to the way different axes of differenciation (race, migration background, religious belonging, class, gender) interacted in the boundary events narrated. In particular, descriptions of the responses to acts of boundary construction were elicited, as well as explanations of the reasons behind such reactions.

Secondly, some theatre workshops inspired by the narrations collected were performed in different secondary schools, strongly characterized by the social class of the pupils who usually attend them (i.e. “licei” and “istituti tecnico-professionali”). The workshops were based on forum theatre, a methodology developed within the theatre of the oppressed, that conceives theatre plays as spaces of collective learning. After some actors performed a paradigmatic boundary event, students from the audience were invited to take part in the dramatizing process, by performing their suggestion to overcome the critical issues at stake.

On the one hand this research experience allowed for an exploration of the discourse around boundaries, with insights into discoursive variations connected to differing class belongings. On the other, it prompted a multi-voice reflection over the available opportunities for social change, towards a renegotiation of boundaries and the generation of more inclusive representations of collective self.

What does history have to share with the promotion of social change and empowerment of young Roma and Sinti youth? How is it possible to talk about discrimination through art?

Starting from TRACER (Transformative Roma Art and Culture for European Remembrance), an international project funded under the European Commission's Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) Programme, I would like to introduce data of an action-research that involve groups of Roma and non-Roma youths and teenagers in Italy, Portugal and Poland, in the construction of a shared memory of the holocaust of Sinti and Roma minorities in Europe (Porrajmos) and in peer education activities.

Reconstructing this moment in history means retrieving part of unknown events about the persecution of these populations in Europe and to transpose a population, which is still subject to discrimination and prejudice and to policies of marginalization, to the centre of European History. For young Roma and Sinti, being aware of the cultural process that led to the creation of the extermination camps and how the concept of diversity defined on the basis of 'race' spread throughout Europe, allows them to deconstruct the stereotypes of the present and contributes to rebuild a culture of respect and rights. This culture of respect for rights is based on the awareness that the discrimination affecting the Roma community today has a long history, on which relations with host communities and widespread institutional racism have an impact.

Tracer action-research develops through a series of consequential steps. One of the basic principles of action-research is the autonomy and empowerment of social actors through a process of investigation, action, reflexivity and (trans)formation. The main actors in Tracer project Roma and non-Roma youth and adolescents, in a process of co-construction of knowledge and change. This approach makes it possible also to retrieve the unpublished sources of information (art, music, orality), which are still the most widespread forms of telling stories in the Roma community, and to relate them to institutional sources (written documents, laws, regulations), which on the other hand represent the way in which the majority society has described the Holocaust and the European history, often without recognising the role of the Roma people.

The Porrajmos’s history becomes the tool that keeps generations of young and old linked, through the collection of interviews with Roma and Sinti families who have had relatives deported in the concentration camps and who describe a process of racial discrimination that reaches the present day. Similarly, history becomes a tool that joins young people, adolescents and Roma and non-Roma pre-adolescents through participation in workshops aimed at the creation of various types of artistic performances (graffiti, murals, music, theatre, video/documentary, etc.), aimed at a wide audience. The performances are a tangible example of the results of the action-research.