Paola Rebughini

• PhD, Professor of Sociology
• Professor at University of Milan

Our aim in this article is to analyse youth aspirations for self-fulfilment through work in the interplay between individualization and self-entrepreneurship. Theoretically, we discuss the main approaches of individualization and self-government in contemporary youth studies. Empirically, we focus on urban youth in the post-pandemic context, in the...

In the past two decades, research in both social movement studies and critical youth studies has recorded growing criticism by youth political activism of the individualising processes characteristic of the neoliberal turn. Based on research conducted in Italy with the new network of activists Up, the article analyses the search for a new equilibri...

The aim of this article is to analyse, on the one hand, the relation between modern ideas of utopia and post/decolonial criticism of the Eurocentric sources of such conceptualizations of utopia and, on the other hand, to expand this critique of historicism and teleological approaches with the help of ecofeminist visions. Current forms of everyday u...

The aim of this introductory article is to shed light on the complexities and ambiguities of the definitions, uses, and categorizations of what is termed ‘racism' or alternatively, in a more flexible and protean manner, ‘othering'. However, while racism and otherness have been forged within the history of modernity, coloniality and capitalism, the...

This is a critical cartography of the notion of agency, of its current transformations, and interdisciplinary intertwining. Whilst in modern social sciences, agency used to be conceptualized as a property of the subject, and the discussion was focused on the extension of such properties, such as intentionality, more recently agency has been expan...

Le but de cet article consiste à faire un bilan analytique de la notion d’individualisation, à partir de ses dynamiques historiques qui, du moins dans le monde occidental, ont toujours insisté sur l’autonomie individuelle. L’article essaie de clarifier les ambivalences conceptuelles et les ambiguïtés qui caractérisent l’utilisation interchangeable...

The aim of this article is to show how young people in Italy deal with the structural injunction to become individuals. While there is a substantial number of works on how institutions converge in promoting individualization and an ‘entrepreneurial self’, in this article we investigate how young people give shape and meaning to social relations in...

The aim of this article is to investigate the role of anxiety as an emotional state frequently identified as the most characteristic of the history of modern Europe, and of the ‘Global North’. Starting from an assessment of the main supporters of this interpretation in social theory – such as the risk society approach of Ulrich Beck, and the role o...

The aim of this article is to offer a reflection on intersectionality as an analytical tool to investigate agency as a situated form of subjective action. In this article, the reference to intersectionality will be considered a useful epistemological and methodological tool to investigate a double specific characteristic of agency: the capability o...

Agencia y vulnerabilidad no son términos alternativos; al contrario, su encuentro hace emerger una característica distintiva de la agencia: la del “débil” que se enfrenta con dificultad a las restricciones y que descubre nuevas oportunidades. Tras una discusión teórica en torno a la relación entre agencia y vulnerabilidad y de las transformaciones...

This chapter investigates the impact that neoliberalism has on the experiences and representations of ‘work’ among young Italians. Drawing on research conducted in the Italian city of Milan from 2013 to 2017, the chapter analyzes the transformations of the perceptions and experiences of work among young people from 18 to 30 years old. The aim is to...

Abstract This article investigates the issue of embodied emotions in social sciences, in a context characterized by increasing theoretical attention to overcoming the nature/culture dualism, but also by a growing dualism between constructivist and ontological approaches to emotions. We take as pivot of the analysis the way in which this topic has b...

For almost 10 years there has been talk of the economic crisis affecting the European area, with more evident effects in the Mediterranean countries. Yet the expression ‘economic crisis’ has become too wide and blurred to be useful for describing how the current socio-economic conjuncture is affecting different categories of young people in differe...

The aim of this article is to explore how, and to what extent, Italian thought – by its focalization on pre-modern theoretical issues and its distance from classical modern topics, such as the philosophy of conscience or the transcendence of language – can offer a different insight on contemporary social theory and critical theory, after the dissol...

The aim of this article is to offer a cartography of the current debate on critical agency, starting from the inner ambivalences of the modern notion of critique as resistant negation and affirmative creation of new practices. First, the article discusses the double-faced nature of critique and its interpretations in the European tradition of criti...

This chapter discusses the concepts of dignity and respect in relation to the situation of the descendants of immigrants, the so-called ‘second generation’. The discussion will be based, on the empirical data of a research study carried out with the children of immigrants in Italy (Colombo and Rebughini 2012) and, on a theoretical reflection about...

À partir des concepts de subjectivation et de désubjectivation mobilisés par Michel Wieviorka et les sociologues de l’action, ce livre développe une réflexion sur les processus de subjectivation dans le contexte historique de la globalisation, du pluralisme culturel et identitaire, d’inégalités croissantes et de vulnérabilité. Cet ouvrage traite de...

The aim of this article is to highlight the relationships between the transformations of the concept of critique and the practices of critique by young generations, in a context of rapid socio economic changes and fragmentation of the debate on critique itself. Starting from this last point, the article investigates, on the one hand, the recent pol...

The possibility to analyse the articulation of class, gender and race/ethnicity, instead of considering them as independent and separate forms of power relations, is at the basis of the notion of intersectionality as an epistemological approach to domination. The analysis conducted in this article tries to enlarge the theoretical and heuristic pote...

This article deals with the topic of emancipation in the social sciences and its transformation in recent decades. Despite its centrality for sociological analysis, emancipation is a topic characterized by ambivalent meanings – autonomy and authenticity, contingency and normativity, free will and negative freedom – and by ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘postcol...

In spite of an enduring attention for ethics and morality, the interest of sociology for human rights is recent, although lively and prolific. Power, violence, domination, the idea that “Whoever says 'humanity' wants to betray” (Carl Schmitt), have been at the core of critical sociology much more than the analysis of subject’s capability to struggl...

In recent years social movements around the world have been more and more explicitly related to the issue of democracy. Since the 90s and the triumph of neoliberalism, transnational movements have struggled for an idea of democracy focused on human rights and inclusive citizenship, and not simply on the freedom of voting, producing and consuming. W...

This article analyses the concept of subject, and its related associated notions of subjectivity and subjectivation. In social sciences the terms subject, individual, agent, person or social actor are often used interchangeably; however, these concepts have different analytical meanings, and each of them is connected to different sociological appro...

The purpose of this article is to show how consumption patterns can provide insight into the way in which immigrant parents and their children negotiate their identities, deal with their social status, and try to build a new life in their country of arrival. There is a lot of research on consumption—especially about the role of objects and brands a...

The social fate of the descendants of immigrants is almost certainly a central concern of migration studies. While migration flows and the adult first migrants have been studied mainly to assess the impact of cultural difference in western societies, to evaluate social policies or to study subjective capacity to adapt, the fate of immigrants’ child...

The necessity to show multiple and differentiated belonging in order to improve personal opportunity and better fit the different contexts in which young people are involved has implications also in group self-identification.

In the previous chapters we have offered an insight into the children of immigrants in plural and differentiated contexts and locations, in the process of coping with belonging and identifications, claiming inclusion and participation, dealing with constraints and opportunities. We have pointed out the relevance of their generational experience, th...

Since the end of the last century a number of specific transformations have profoundly altered various aspects of our social experiences. Technological improvements in communications and transport, and a growing ‘complex connectivity’ (Tomlinson 1999) have modified our concept of local, belonging, and engagement. People are ‘more connected’ because...

The struggle to find a particular social location in which continuity and change can be managed without making a clearly defined choice between the opposing alternatives is also evident when belonging is at stake.

Theoretical insights into the children of immigrants are inevitably inspired by the empirical contexts in which they are elaborated: local, national, political, historic and linguistic features frame the way in which individuals and groups act and make their choices, but these empirical features influence theoretical interpretations too.

The aim of this article is to present the cultures and practices of consumption among young people with immigrant origins in Italy. Models of consumption can be an interesting way to study at the same time subjective and contingent aspects of consumption practices and structural aspects of consumption behaviour, linked to economic, social and cultu...

The aim of this article is to analyze friendship ties and the emotions connected to them in some particular phases of life: periods when subjects are faced with difficult challenges such as mourning, separation, job loss or illness. Under these circumstances, friendship ties and emotions take on exceptional intensity. To investigate this moments I...

La critica intesa nella sua accezione più generale è considerata come un elemento fondante delle scienze sociali e della filosofia politica, eppure non esiste una sua definizione consensuale né tanto meno una condivisione della prospettiva da cui è possibile giustificare l’esistenza della critica e delle sue basi epistemologiche. L’articolo si conc...

Introduction En Italie, les etudes sur les jeunes descendants d’immigres ont debute a partir des annees 1990 quand, pour la premiere fois, les enfants de migrants sont apparus dans les ecoles maternelles et primaires. Cependant, ce n’est qu’a partir de la decennie suivante que les recherches quantitatives et qualitatives, locales et nationales, se...

This article aims to confront the principal arguments of the concept of critique in sociology and to demonstrate the emergence in recent years of a re-dimensioned conception of critique, on the one hand, of a pragmatic, pluralistic and contingent nature, and, on the other, show how the need for a strong and transcendental concept of critique that d...

- This article discusses the future of the second and third generations in Italy by developing a generational perspective. Through the adoption of a constructionist theoretical approach, informed by works on globalization and the new social movements, it tries to advance beyond the limits of theories and observations at time of fordism, based on co...

This article deals with the problem of the future of the second generation in Italy. After a brief overview of the main perspectives currently adopted to theorise the future of the second and subsequent generations, the Italian situation is introduced. Our objective is to see whether and how the observations made especially in contexts with a long...

The book of Alberto L’Abate, Per un Futuro senza guerre. Dalle esperienze personali a una teoria sociologica per la pace, is a wide reflection around the theory and practice of peace. The author brings together and discusses the work of the historical international thinkers of peace and resistance against violence, but he makes also a general refle...

The aim of this article is to carry out a comparative analysis of collective action against racism in Europe with particular attention to the engagement of young people. «Anti-racism» means a civil or an institutional engagement against different forms of prejudice and racial discrimination. It is possible to distinguish between «institutional» ant...