Migrant Minds: the migrant experience
We can read the phenomena of migration, which follow geographic and political paths, characterized by conflicts, irreducible diversities, unelaborated traumas or hybridizations owing to the identity threatening, confusing phenomena of globalization. Besides this, these phenomena also indicate the difficulty of constructing the processes of subjectivity in both the various populations, with their specific cultural forms and the individual.
Experiences involving migrants and refugees, but also entire generations, marked by a social insecurity capable of deeply affecting the ways of social and psychic ties. We live in an age of symbolic precariousness, of “symbolic dislocations”, which by its nature defines subjects in search of an identity definition to construct, or of an experiential gap to close, but also, for this same reason, subjects open to transformation.
How shall we look upon these changes to the very roots of subjectivity, induced by the accelerating and often tumultuous anthropological transformations of which we are becoming aware? Transformations which are imposing on the technical level, as they are deficient on the level of an adequate symbolization, and which at times result in blind violence or in some kind of alexithymia that prevents any perception or emotional expression.
It is a true modification of the very structure of symbolic ties, happening in both the psychic and social processes, where the structural and founding bonds, which are linked to a genealogy and a cultural tradition with its myth foundations, seem to have been lost. A modification where the "breaches" opening at different levels are apparently bridged by adherent and mimetic associations, as solid as they are frail, or by real attempts to ’re-establish' identity with delusional tones.
We want to open this category to study models of interpretation of these phenomena and to describe the various experiences that are taking place in the world.
February 2018: Florence Conference on Migrant minds, Adolescent minds -
Between eradications and radicalisations
Available in French only:
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Transitions Transformations Migrations: avancer sur les marges by Virginia De Micco
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Identifications alienantes by Daniela Scotto di Fasano
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Les adolescents à l’épreuve de l’exil by Jalil Bennani
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Esprits migrants, Esprits adolescents by Clelia De Vita
August 2019:
The double body of the adolescent migrants by Virginia De Micco *
new entry*.
The material discussed in this article comes from interventions carried out at a refugee centre for unaccompanied minors: interventions of group supervision directed to the team of operators and individual sessions with the young girls, guests at the centre.