The Field as an Analytical Device for Unaccompanied Foreign Minors: Capital, Habitus, and Symbolic Violence in Reception Processes in Italy
Keywords:
Unaccompanied Foreign Minors, Field theory, Habitus, Symbolic violence, Recognition, Cultural CapitalAbstract
This article offers a theoretical re-reading of the social trajectories of Unaccompanied Foreign Minors (UFMs) in Italy through Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, in dialogue with the Foucauldian analysis of dispositifs. It is not an original empirical study: it reworks evidence already produced—chiefly a constructivist Grounded Theory—together with institutional and statistical sources. It argues that field, capital and habitus offer a tool for moving beyond the individualizing readings that prevail in institutional discourse, shifting attention from individual vulnerabilities to the structures that produce them. UFMs operate in heterogeneous fields—juridical-institutional, educational, residential, informal networks—and in a transnational field, each with its own logics of capital recognition. The hysteresis of habitus is read as a structural knot; symbolic violence as systemic misrecognition. The analysis yields pedagogical implications centred on the recognition of embodied capital and on training practitioners as agents of symbolic capital.
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