Week of September 8

Hi there,

It has been a long time since I have been able to write. As Sam mentioned in the earlier blog, I did have quite a health scare and am not quite sure what happened. But the doctors ordered a few days of rest for me so I am trying to do that. However, I had arranged most things for the students so that they could go on their own. They went to the St. Paul's Refugee Center this morning and are returning tomorrow morning, as well. This is a refugee center only for political refugees and when they apply for this status, they cannot work for a period of time so at this center they give out meals and it is also a place for them to hang out. I think they were happy to have the students hang out with them, talk with them and also play some games with them. This afternoon, I had arranged a visit to the Department of Education here (the Ministero di Pubblica Istruzione). Here, they met Dottor Vinicio Ongini who was in charge of the program for Intercultural Education in the last government, which is the main label used here, for integrating immigrant children in schools. In this last government there were high hopes that this could be an attempt at having a national programmatic approach - some of the basic aspects of this is to link the program to basic human rights that are universal, having a program which values students and values diversity - this would be a program where students are integrated within the regular school and where there is not a separate school for them, and also where students can have access to learning Italian. What is especially fascinating is that the word identity keeps coming up and the idea is that the identity of the school where the kids come in has to be refashioned to accomodate immigrant children. Interestingly, the word "children of immigrants" and "foreign children" keeps being used interchangeably. In our readings, especially Stephen Castle's Age of Migration, it is clear that Italy has an ethnic model of the nation state and citizenship - the national identity, therefore, needs to be refashioned. I can see that Italy has to begin to accept this new mulicultural identity, and many parts of it are resisting it. In Italy, these often get positioned as coming from the right or the left. Many fear that the new rightist government will not go forward with this Intercultural Approach and will also undo some of the immigration regulations, restricting immigrant rights further. But even many in the left have criticized the leftist goverment for having taken a passive approach and denying many people's fears and stating "no to racism" but not really engaging with the problem and engaging with the fact that there is racism and fear. It will be really interesting to have Amara Lakhous, famous novelist of Morrocan origin, who has written this book that was just translated in English, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. He and the students will be having a question and answer session tomorrow evening about his work but about the fundamental issues of identity and how race, ethnicity and religion intersect in talking about identity. On Thursday, I hope to be back with full force and we will be going to DiDonato school and speaking to the teachers that morning - in the afternoon, we will be summarizing our class so far and integrating our readings. On Friday, either we will be visiting a Rom (gypsy) settlement that I have been trying to arrange and if not, students will have a chance to make serious headway for the projects they are supposed to present next week.