Media, esperienza e racconto biografico : la comunicazione multiculturale : quattro comunità di immigrati a Milano

In the second year, the research on multicultural communication has broadly followed the guidelines established in the first year, while at the same time deepening the scope and widening the focus. As for the first aspect, the researchers have considered, as in the previous year, both life histories and interviews on cultural and media consumption. New subjects have been interviewed, in order to test and enrich the results achieved at the end of the first year of research. As for the second one, the families involved in the reserch have been asked to participate in a second session of interview, based on the retelling of two television programmes, news and fiction.

The scope was to explore the way in wich texts from the culture of destination can offer meaningful resources to articulate the two cultural worlds and to make meaning of the experience of the different subjects. A map of the different communicative forms has been drawed for the different cultural groups, defined by the relationships between media (either from the country of origin, or national, or international) and the cultural attitude of the subjects (more keen on cultural integration vs defensive of cultural specificity). The practice of retelling made it possible to explore the strategies of construction of an "hibrid" identity, as well as the way in which media texts are used as a reflexive resource. Finally, the analysis of life histories made it possible to deepen the understanding of cultural attitudes of the subjects interviewed, with particular emphasis on the temporal dimension and the role of memory in the definition of identity. [Publisher's Text].