Le soglie che provocano. Corpi, spazio e culture nella dimora della contemporaneità

Nowadays the social sciences have made us aware of the manifold nature of care work, and the problematic feature of identity constructions due to the simultaneous coexistence, at the same level, of a wide range of differences hardly definable. It becomes urgent that at the level of us - in our groups, in our institutions - the cultural processes can be released from their adherence to certain models, helping to return the concept of culture to the places where it is redefined and reactivated. For this reason, the research was born and raised within two institutions, in the Verona area, that deal with child care and education, starting from what, every day, takes place within them, namely a meeting, or rather, a network of meetings, among knowledge and people, identity and otherness. The method of investigation is the result of a crossbreeding of tools, and the intersection of various disciplines: participant observation, collection of life-stories of practitioners committed in the field of care and education, and migrant parents I met on field, historical and institutional analysis (along the lines traced by the Foucauldian studies), study and exploration of the dimensions of the trip, and the impossibility - sometimes - of the return within the migration phenomenon. I imposed to my research the obligation to cast a critical light on our cultural constructions, and on the concepts of care, identity, education, in the belief that working with migrants is primarily a compulsion to re-think our idea of universal, which too often hides all the differences and ends up seizing all the space for thought and practice, depriving us of the possibility of true innovation, which accrues only when we think we are, along with the others, different. My proposal is to consider the care institutions as real cultural systems, which can produce change and innovation, only insofar as they will be able to open their space to insurrectional and challenging words, factors, in brief, which have the potential to trigger changes, even radical. Talk about, and show, the otherness within the institutions are the actions that constitute the will to bear witness that none holds a unique knowledge, but rather that we are experiencing the conflict of the contemporary scene, which forces us to live and learn under the mutual bond to take seriously our own and others' words, our and others' stories, our and others' knowledge, experimenting in the field the paradoxes and contradictions of the encounter with the other, of the claim of Self, of the identity constructions.