Governing youth: fragility and dangerousness as moral devices in italian public discourse

Abstract

This article examines the discursive construction of youth through a comparative analysis of two case studies: a nightclub fire in Crans-Montana and the media category of maranza in the Italian context. Drawing on critical youth studies and discourse analysis, the study analyses a corpus of Reddit data to explore how public narratives represent young people either as vulnerable subjects deserving compassion or as dangerous figures requiring containment. Despite their apparent opposition, both representations share a common logic: the denial of youth agency, the displacement of structural analysis by individualised moral judgement, and the naturalisation of class, gender, and race-based privileges and inequalities. Through a critical reading of media content and online discussions, the study shows how these frames operate as devices of symbolic governance, shaping social expectations, institutional practices, and processes of subjectification. Public discourse thus emerges as a mechanism of pre-socialisation that precedes and conditions educational and social interventions. The analysis further suggests that such frames are reproduced and reworked by young people themselves, thereby contributing to the stabilisation of symbolic hierarchies in educational and social contexts. The pedagogical implications bear directly on educational agencies, which do not operate in a neutral space but within a symbolic field already structured by class, gender, and racialisation hierarchies. If public discourse functions as a device of pre-socialisation, fostering genuine processes of subjectification requires critically interrogating the categories through which young people are named and governed. An education capable of restoring agency cannot bypass the critical analysis of the discursive devices that systematically deny it.