Voices beyond bars

The young second-generation migrants, often live a difficult situation in the process of inclusion and connection in the society where they want to integrate. The outcome of these difficulties is a marginal and marginalized way of life, sometimes shared with the most disadvantaged social groups and the subsequent borderline positioning towards deviant or criminal behavior. In fact, the circuit of exclusion leads to the effect of confirming bias: excluded and unable to play a full role in society, the young man enters the only context that welcomes him, that of petty crime.
The project aims to give young migrants in prison or subjected to other penalties, and their border-line friends in schools or informal groups, the opportunity to build a representation of themselves which is freed from the narration that is being done on them, a new point of view that facilitates their entry into the public space beyond the connections with their communities of origin.
In detail, the specific objective is the experimentation of a web radio as a tool for both the operators and the young to improve the rate of social reintegration, or prevention of criminal behavior. An App for smartphone will be also realized to facilitate the diffusion of the web radio.
The development of this tool can lead to a better ability of the target group in representing a positive side of their personalities; to improve their social skills and civil participation (active citizenship); to empower their capacities in languages and so to find legal job opportunities in more countries; to play a role in enforcing the prevention that people from the same marginal social group can fall in criminal behavior; to reduce the social alarm caused by phenomena of petty crime.
Through the web radio and the workshops realized to help the users in leading it, the project will activate experiences of participatory media and will involve in each country a total of at least 100 young people, both from the migrant community and the local marginal social context.
Generative themes (open to further developments) will be chosen by the participants of the target group, assisted by youth workers and operators involved and these themes will form the core of the experiential research in the territories of the workshops.
Particular attention will be given to the media for their facilitating impact which helps to overcome any language difficulties. Opportunities will be given to experiment with other communication tools and practices, such as blogs. The products will be documented through an e-learning platform and also published on a special Facebook page and a YouTube channel: tools familiar to the target group. The platform will facilitate in providing, in separate sections, to professionals as well as young workers, any proposals for the workshops; and to the young participants, information, practical advice and examples. The set of ICT will provide all users with the opportunity to exchange ideas and expertise at different levels: qualitatively higher within the platform, the more immediate with Facebook and Youtube, thus realizing an international exchange on issues and practices as seen and experienced in each context and country. The platform will be mostly used as a practical tool to improve the innovation and will be not an output in itself.
The methodology will be based on action research, which is a constant interaction between the operational dimension and reflection, with the intent to draw from the field workers' experience and to transfer this experience and documented best practices into the creation of paths of non-formal and informal education using participatory media. This side of the work that will bring to the output will be carried out by researchers of the University of Bologna specialized in cultural anthropology and education through international twinning.
To spread the use of the web radio and to make effective the relational dimension, which represents a crucial educational side of the action, street and school activities will be carried out among the informal groups of young second generation migrants with borderline behaviors from the same neighborhood of the target group.
This set of educational tools is designed to make an impact that goes beyond the project and leads to further developments, both as tools for other professionals in the field, and a renewed care, in the debate on migration and youth policies, of the youth target group's voices.