Conference Program

This paper explores how university students with migrant background in Italy imagine and pursue their futures, and how these projections intersect with identity, belonging, and experiences of inequality within tertiary education. We approach universities as ambivalent spaces, marked by both inclusionary and exclusionary dynamics (Gilberti et al. 2025), sites where aspirations are nurtured and social mobility becomes thinkable, but also arenas in which structural constraints, racialization, and symbolic boundaries are reproduced. In this context, future orientations offer a privileged lens through which to examine how inequality is experienced, negotiated, and transformed.

The paper draws on qualitative research conducted within a broader national project on Italian youth and their orientations toward the future. It focuses on a case study of young adults with migrant backgrounds who have accessed or completed tertiary education. By centring on students who have entered university pathways, the study does not aim to present “success stories,” nor to deny persistent educational inequalities affecting children of migration in Italy - often described in terms of educational segregation (Bozzetti 2021). Rather, it investigates how aspirations are formed and pursued from within unequal social structures, and how higher education becomes a key terrain where experiences of exclusion and projects of future-making intersect.

Based on semi-structured narrative interviews, the analysis reconstructs participants’ educational trajectories and examines how intercultural daily practices as well as experiences of discrimination and misrecognition shape both their sense of belonging and their expectations for the future. Yet these narratives also reveal strategies of navigation, reflexivity, and growing critical awareness. University pathways emerge as spaces in which constraints are not simply endured but interpreted, contested, and re-signified.

The paper focuses on two interconnected issues. First, it explores how experiences of exclusion within educational institutions inform processes of identity construction and belonging, shaping the ways in which young adults position themselves within Italian society. Second, it examines how aspirations and future expectations intersect with advanced educational pathways and are reconfigured through the university experience, potentially fostering a sharper awareness of the structural dynamics shaping students’ opportunities and encouraging renewed commitments to countering exclusion and contributing to a fairer society.

In this perspective, the future can be understood as a site of social transformation (Appadurai 2013). The anticipatory practices through which these young adults imagine what may lie ahead - and what they would like it to be - are shaped by present inequalities, yet simultaneously act upon them. Their educational projects thus operate at both personal and collective levels, mobilizing belonging, recognition, and claims to justice (Colombo, Rebughini 2012). In this sense, the children of migration who reach the higher stages of the education system - often overcoming multiple obstacles - can be understood as powerful agents of transformation, whose aspirations extend beyond individual social mobility to encompass collective well-being and societal reconfiguration.