Le famiglie straniere e il dispositivo di tutela dei minori. Un’analisi del discorso sulla genitorialità

This research addresses the relationship that is established between the Child Protection device and foreign families, analyzed from the discourse on parenting that is constructed in this context. The reasons that make this dynamic relevant are to be found in its bringing out aspects indicative of the interaction that is generated between an institutional system and a part of the population that occupies a minority social and cultural position. All this takes place on the particularly delicate and slippery terrain of protecting children from risks and dangers that, as we shall see extensively below, are believed to be represented primarily by parents. The research intercepts three different themes: migration, child protection and parenting. Before observing their action on the discursive level, each of them will be explored in its own complexity, delving into the history and aspects that have established them as social constructs, trying to situate them in the context of the factors that have determined their semantic variations, with the intention of breaking down the framework that tends, instead, to present them as naturalized assumptions. This study aims to detect through what modalities the action of power shapes this relationship, focusing not so much on the explicit logics that configure the role of those who are guarantors of the law and those who are, based on it, evaluated, but on the implicit aspects that convey these dynamics through discursive practices. The perspective of inquiry is that of Critical Discourse Analysis (Foucault, 1972; Van Dijk, 2008; Fairclough, 1995a), whose object of interest is discourse understood as the pragmatic-cognitive act that in representing reality establishes it in a certain meaning. The action that develops the juvenile guardianship device, therefore, will be observed from the perspective of the argumentative process that is generated from the attribution of meaning to parental behaviors, correlated with the child's state of well-being or discomfort. This semantic operation may imply the action of power dynamics conveyed through ideology, understood as a mental substratum that unites certain social groups (Van Dijk, 2003b) defined as dominant by virtue of the possibility of making their interpretative categories generally valid, as opposed to others that are connoted as minorities starting from an unequal possibility of affecting the processes of signification. Interest and research questions are located in this area.