Valentina Cuzzocrea
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 105847 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Valentina Cuzzocrea |
| PRENOMES | Valentina |
| SOBRENOME | Cuzzocrea |
| ASSINATURA | CUZZOCREA V |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Cagliari |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7467-8020 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 175 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2011 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
You_are_not_alone
Youth studies have traditionally devoted little attention to youth’s emotions. However, according to international [WHO, 2024. Mental health of adolescents report. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health; Lancet, 2025] and Italian dataset [ISTAT, 2023. Report BES. Il benessere equo e sostenibile in Italia], anxiety couples with a growth of mental health problems across youth, ranging from depression to other form…
Framing optimism sociologically
This article critically examines the concept of optimism through a sociological lens, challenging its conventional portrayal as a unidimensional, inherently positive, and often unrealistic disposition towards the future. We first argue against an individualistic understanding of optimism, emphasizing the necessity of integrating it into social theory as a multifaceted, cultural, affective, and temporal phenomenon. By elucidating our criticism of …
Foreclosed future’ in between continuity and innovation in youth’ futures research
This contribution discusses how the metaphor of youth futures as ‘foreclosed futures’ suggested by Santiago del Rìo et al. is both rooted in the existing literature on youth's experiences of temporal suspension and at the same time extends that literature by addressing the shifting structural conditions youth people face today. This commentary therefore highlights how the intensifying climate of hardship further reinforces and strengthens the cen…
Timing" Transitions or "Times" in Transition? Revisiting the Value of Time Suspension for Young People in Italy After the Covid-19 Pandemic
Much has been written to address the increasing complexity of youth temporalities, especially through a focus on when adulthood is reached, an approach that informs the tradition of youth studies called "youth transitions." This article discusses some of the shortcomings of this approach that were revealed during the global pandemic, through the social distancing measures that were put in place in response to it and how young people reacted to ne…
Young People Experiencing Multiple Mobilities
In this study, we look at those young Europeans who have undertaken more than one Erasmus stay abroad during their higher education to reflect on spaces for youth development. On the basis of 18 qualitative interviews with such Erasmus students, we propose the concept of an ‘oasis of youth’ to highlight the potential for the exploration of the self that occurs through participation in mobilities. We revisit and reassess J.J. Arnett’s concept of e…
Feeling the future
‘È un’opzione che ho valutato da diverso tempo’
This contribution discusses the nuances of vulnerability that emerge from the relationship with the territory of secondary school students in a rural area of Sardinia. The article confronts the most updated definitions of vulnerability with current debates on youth, transitions to work and transitions to adulthood scholarship. Part of a wider project on the PCTO (still called in the narratives of the students with the old name of ‘alternance’), i…
‘It was like walking inside myself’
The recent Covid-19 pandemic has irrupted into youth’s lives and their relations to the city abruptly. Young people, in particular, make use of public space to forge relationships with peers for them significant: in this sense the city is a key source of identity in their journey towards adulthood. The city can be thought of as a space of their own, in a continuous process of co-construction of “their” city on the one hand, and the expression of …
Erasmus students’ motivations in motion
This paper looks at youth mobility as an ongoing, dynamic, processual experience in the making of an educational trajectory. By exploring the experiences of students who have undertaken more than one mobility experience under the Erasmus + program, we reflect on how underlying motivations change over the course of subsequent mobility experiences. In contrast to existing research, where the focus has been on reported motivations for one-off mobili…
Special issue of International Journal of Social Welfare
The challenges of integrating perspectives in looking at youth transitions to employmentIn contemporary societies, young people face strong uncertainties upon transitioning into the labour market.Transitions from education to employment have become reversible, unstable, following scarcely predictable yo-yo trajectories (Biggart and Walther, 2006).The opportunity structuresas contexts of possibilities and constraints affecting the expected outcome…
Youth Collectivities
Forms of Collective Engagement in Youth Transitions
This collection sheds light on diverse forms of collective engagement among young people. Recent developments in youth studies, and the changing global shape of socio-economic conditions for young people, demand new approaches and ideas. Contributors focus on novel processes, practices and routines within youth collectivity in various contexts across the globe, including Indonesia, Spain, Italy, Norway and Poland. The chapters pay particular atte…
Italian Youth in International Context
Italy is not a country for young people. Why? This book provides a unique and in-depth collection of empirical and theoretical material providing multiple answers to this question whilst investigating the living conditions of young people in Italy today.By bringing together a variety of approaches and methods, the authors of this collection analyze Italian youth through the lenses of three dimensions: ‘Activism, participation and citizenship’, ‘W…
Mobile moratorium? The case of young people undertaking international internships
This article explores a significant yet curiously understudied form of transnational mobility as practiced by the highly qualified in Europe, namely the international internship. We argue that an international internship can be an ambivalent stage within youth transitions. While possibly providing a potential point of entry into a ‘dream’ career path, the economic and emotional costs of such undertakings also need to be accounted for, including a…
Youth transitions as ‘wiki-transitions’ in youth policies platforms
In recent years, a number of youth-focused online platforms have emerged which, in different ways, seek to support young people across Europe in building pathways to independent adulthood. In this article, we draw on data from Edgeryders, a recent youth policy research project, to reflect on the extent to which online discussion platforms are useful instruments for understanding the challenges youth face in their transitions to independent adulth…
A place for mobility in metaphors of youth transitions
Metaphors are central in the study of youth; in fact, it has been argued that ‘youth’ itself could be considered a metaphor. In a recent assessment of transition-related metaphors, Cuervo and Wyn [2014. “Reflections on the Use of Spatial and Relational Metaphors in Youth Studies.” Journal of Youth Studies 17 (7): 901–915.] have noted that such metaphors as ‘niches’, ‘pathways’, ‘trajectories’ and ‘navigations’, often contain an element of movemen…
Julia Cook, Imagined futures. Hope, risk and uncertainty
Moratorium or waithood? Forms of time-taking and the changing shape of youth
Developing Erikson's concept of 'psychological moratorium' (1968), literature on youth transitions has a central focus in the procrastination of adult roles. Forms of time taking may either be erratic, or take more institutionalised and/or middle-class-oriented shapes such as 'gap years,' and they are generally justified by the aim of self-experimentation. However, on a different institutional level, they enter in contrast with the recent imperat…
Introducing the need to study young people in contemporary Italy
1. The idea of this Special Issue arises from reflections shared between the guest editors while participating in the Pool of European Youth Researchers, a group of researchers coordinated by the Y
Youth as a metaphor
What are the specificities of youth in Italy as a group? How are they received in civil society and beyond? What kind of approaches have characterized the study of youth in Italy throughout the last decades? In this interview, the editors of this Special Issue open a conversation with Carmen Leccardi, a leading scholar in the field whose work has impacted the study of Italian youth not only in Italy but also internationally. Leccardi investigates…
A Possibility to Square the Circle? Youth Uncertainty and the Imagination of Late Adulthood
Youth transitions literature has traditionally devoted great attention to identifying and analysing events that are considered crucial to young people regarding their (short term) orientation to the future and wider narratives of the self. Such categories as 'turning points', 'critical moments', and 'crossroads' have been used to identify and explain the events around which young people take important decisions in order to realise the so-called t…
Rooted mobilities' in young people's narratives of the future
Youth research recognises that the struggles typical of the transition to adulthood can no longer be assumed to occur 'at home'. However, few investigations have focused on how the imagination of mobility shapes that which is not home yet but which may later become so. To address this lacuna, this article engages with how the imagination of the future of young people is entrenched with 'motility', namely, the possibility for a type of movement th…
Corporate social responsibility and conflicts of interest in the alcohol and gambling industries
The corporate pursuit of social goals - known as Corporate Social Responsibility or 'CSR' - has been subject to critique on a number of grounds. However, a hitherto underexplored potential consequence of CSR has been suggested in a recent paper by C. Garsten and K. Jacobsson ('Post-Political Regulation: Soft Power and Post-political Visions in Global Governance' (2013), Critical Sociology 39: 421-37). They suggest that CSR is part of an internati…
The Consequences of Mobility
This book explores various forms of highly skilled mobility in the European Union, assessing the potential for this movement to contribute to individual and societal development. In doing so, the authors illustrate some of the issues arising from the opening up of Europe’s borders, and exposing its education systems and labour markets to international competition. While acknowledging the potentially positive aspects of mobility, they also reveal …
Students’ narratives of the future
In the context of the ‘iFuture’ research project, 341 18-year-old Sardinian students were asked to write an essay in which they imagined themselves at 90 and described what their futures (in the past) would look like. Such data allow us to investigate the notion of agency. Agency and the future are deeply intertwined: agency involves the idea of projection and implies anticipation; the ‘desired’ futures have an impact on the ways in which youth a…
Students’ narratives of the future
In the context of the ‘iFuture’ research project, 341 18-year-old Sardinian students were asked to write an essay in which they imagined themselves at 90 and described what their futures (in the past) would look like. Such data allow us to investigate the notion of agency. Agency and the future are deeply intertwined: agency involves the idea of projection and implies anticipation; the ‘desired’ futures have an impact on the ways in which youth a…
Moratorium or waithood? Forms of time-taking and the changing shape of youth
Developing Erikson's concept of 'psychological moratorium' (1968), literature on youth transitions has a central focus in the procrastination of adult roles. Forms of time taking may either be erratic, or take more institutionalised and/or middle-class-oriented shapes such as 'gap years,' and they are generally justified by the aim of self-experimentation. However, on a different institutional level, they enter in contrast with the recent imperat…
A place for mobility in metaphors of youth transitions
Metaphors are central in the study of youth; in fact, it has been argued that ‘youth’ itself could be considered a metaphor. In a recent assessment of transition-related metaphors, Cuervo and Wyn [2014. “Reflections on the Use of Spatial and Relational Metaphors in Youth Studies.” Journal of Youth Studies 17 (7): 901–915.] have noted that such metaphors as ‘niches’, ‘pathways’, ‘trajectories’ and ‘navigations’, often contain an element of movemen…
Collaborative Individualization? Peer-to-peer Action in Youth Transitions
In this article we propose the notion of collaborative individualization (henceforth, C.I.) as a means of characterizing young people’s attempts to define their identities as simultaneously self-reliant and in need of support and collaboration. Our arguments are based on the findings of a transnational case study: a recent Council of Europe policy project called Edgeryders, an online platform whose participants were invited to discuss their exper…
Rooted mobilities' in young people's narratives of the future
Youth research recognises that the struggles typical of the transition to adulthood can no longer be assumed to occur 'at home'. However, few investigations have focused on how the imagination of mobility shapes that which is not home yet but which may later become so. To address this lacuna, this article engages with how the imagination of the future of young people is entrenched with 'motility', namely, the possibility for a type of movement th…
Introducing the need to study young people in contemporary Italy
1. The idea of this Special Issue arises from reflections shared between the guest editors while participating in the Pool of European Youth Researchers, a group of researchers coordinated by the Y
The Consequences of Mobility
This book explores various forms of highly skilled mobility in the European Union, assessing the potential for this movement to contribute to individual and societal development. In doing so, the authors illustrate some of the issues arising from the opening up of Europe’s borders, and exposing its education systems and labour markets to international competition. While acknowledging the potentially positive aspects of mobility, they also reveal …
Youth as a metaphor
What are the specificities of youth in Italy as a group? How are they received in civil society and beyond? What kind of approaches have characterized the study of youth in Italy throughout the last decades? In this interview, the editors of this Special Issue open a conversation with Carmen Leccardi, a leading scholar in the field whose work has impacted the study of Italian youth not only in Italy but also internationally. Leccardi investigates…
Feeling the future
Domesticating” the City
The aim of this article is to rethink the analysis of urban life and the practices involving the use of urban space. To that end, we focus on the value that such practices have for social enquiry by employing the concept of domestication, which was originally elaborated by Silverstone in the field of media and technology scholarship. Specifically, the potential value of such usage is to embed practices that produce space in the complexity of the …
Mobile moratorium? The case of young people undertaking international internships
This article explores a significant yet curiously understudied form of transnational mobility as practiced by the highly qualified in Europe, namely the international internship. We argue that an international internship can be an ambivalent stage within youth transitions. While possibly providing a potential point of entry into a ‘dream’ career path, the economic and emotional costs of such undertakings also need to be accounted for, including a…
"Fragments of "Cultures of Mobility
This article develops a portrait of cultures of mobility emerging from empirical research conducted in Cagliari, southern Italy. The research focuses on the everyday mobility enacted by parents as they aim to take good care of their young children. To illuminate that mobility is more than the transport of bodies, but creates sets of different cultural meanings, we draw on Thévenot's work on "pragmatic regimes" (2001), or ways people use to engage…
A Possibility to Square the Circle? Youth Uncertainty and the Imagination of Late Adulthood
Youth transitions literature has traditionally devoted great attention to identifying and analysing events that are considered crucial to young people regarding their (short term) orientation to the future and wider narratives of the self. Such categories as 'turning points', 'critical moments', and 'crossroads' have been used to identify and explain the events around which young people take important decisions in order to realise the so-called t…
Cities and Mobilities
Timing" Transitions or "Times" in Transition? Revisiting the Value of Time Suspension for Young People in Italy After the Covid-19 Pandemic
Much has been written to address the increasing complexity of youth temporalities, especially through a focus on when adulthood is reached, an approach that informs the tradition of youth studies called "youth transitions." This article discusses some of the shortcomings of this approach that were revealed during the global pandemic, through the social distancing measures that were put in place in response to it and how young people reacted to ne…
Corporate social responsibility and conflicts of interest in the alcohol and gambling industries
The corporate pursuit of social goals - known as Corporate Social Responsibility or 'CSR' - has been subject to critique on a number of grounds. However, a hitherto underexplored potential consequence of CSR has been suggested in a recent paper by C. Garsten and K. Jacobsson ('Post-Political Regulation: Soft Power and Post-political Visions in Global Governance' (2013), Critical Sociology 39: 421-37). They suggest that CSR is part of an internati…
Special issue of International Journal of Social Welfare
The challenges of integrating perspectives in looking at youth transitions to employmentIn contemporary societies, young people face strong uncertainties upon transitioning into the labour market.Transitions from education to employment have become reversible, unstable, following scarcely predictable yo-yo trajectories (Biggart and Walther, 2006).The opportunity structuresas contexts of possibilities and constraints affecting the expected outcome…
Julia Cook, Imagined futures. Hope, risk and uncertainty
Squeezing or blurring
In moving the first significant steps into a meaningful graduate career, young adults need to elaborate strategies, which consist in identifying and activating what seems useful in one's own context of reference. Specifically looking at the meaning of being young adults in two countries belonging to different welfare systems and thus diverging regimes of transitions to adulthood, i.e. Italy and England, this paper analyses how two groups of early…
Sociological Conceptualisations of ‘Career’
In the last decades, the use and meaning of the concept of career has profoundly changed, shaped by a ‘new career’ literature rhetoric and a move away from mainstream sociological debate. Our aim in this article is to provide a critical assessment of the concept, and to make a productive contribution to the current debate on careers, and work more generally. Specifically, we seek to: (i) critique the lack of elaboration of the concept within the …
Squeezing or blurring
In moving the first significant steps into a meaningful graduate career, young adults need to elaborate strategies, which consist in identifying and activating what seems useful in one's own context of reference. Specifically looking at the meaning of being young adults in two countries belonging to different welfare systems and thus diverging regimes of transitions to adulthood, i.e. Italy and England, this paper analyses how two groups of early…
Students’ narratives of the future
In the context of the ‘iFuture’ research project, 341 18-year-old Sardinian students were asked to write an essay in which they imagined themselves at 90 and described what their futures (in the past) would look like. Such data allow us to investigate the notion of agency. Agency and the future are deeply intertwined: agency involves the idea of projection and implies anticipation; the ‘desired’ futures have an impact on the ways in which youth a…
Domesticating” the City
The aim of this article is to rethink the analysis of urban life and the practices involving the use of urban space. To that end, we focus on the value that such practices have for social enquiry by employing the concept of domestication, which was originally elaborated by Silverstone in the field of media and technology scholarship. Specifically, the potential value of such usage is to embed practices that produce space in the complexity of the …
Collaborative Individualization? Peer-to-peer Action in Youth Transitions
In this article we propose the notion of collaborative individualization (henceforth, C.I.) as a means of characterizing young people’s attempts to define their identities as simultaneously self-reliant and in need of support and collaboration. Our arguments are based on the findings of a transnational case study: a recent Council of Europe policy project called Edgeryders, an online platform whose participants were invited to discuss their exper…
"Fragments of "Cultures of Mobility
This article develops a portrait of cultures of mobility emerging from empirical research conducted in Cagliari, southern Italy. The research focuses on the everyday mobility enacted by parents as they aim to take good care of their young children. To illuminate that mobility is more than the transport of bodies, but creates sets of different cultural meanings, we draw on Thévenot's work on "pragmatic regimes" (2001), or ways people use to engage…
Cities and Mobilities
Corporate social responsibility and conflicts of interest in the alcohol and gambling industries
The corporate pursuit of social goals - known as Corporate Social Responsibility or 'CSR' - has been subject to critique on a number of grounds. However, a hitherto underexplored potential consequence of CSR has been suggested in a recent paper by C. Garsten and K. Jacobsson ('Post-Political Regulation: Soft Power and Post-political Visions in Global Governance' (2013), Critical Sociology 39: 421-37). They suggest that CSR is part of an internati…
The Consequences of Mobility
This book explores various forms of highly skilled mobility in the European Union, assessing the potential for this movement to contribute to individual and societal development. In doing so, the authors illustrate some of the issues arising from the opening up of Europe’s borders, and exposing its education systems and labour markets to international competition. While acknowledging the potentially positive aspects of mobility, they also reveal …
Introducing the need to study young people in contemporary Italy
1. The idea of this Special Issue arises from reflections shared between the guest editors while participating in the Pool of European Youth Researchers, a group of researchers coordinated by the Y
Youth as a metaphor
What are the specificities of youth in Italy as a group? How are they received in civil society and beyond? What kind of approaches have characterized the study of youth in Italy throughout the last decades? In this interview, the editors of this Special Issue open a conversation with Carmen Leccardi, a leading scholar in the field whose work has impacted the study of Italian youth not only in Italy but also internationally. Leccardi investigates…
A Possibility to Square the Circle? Youth Uncertainty and the Imagination of Late Adulthood
Youth transitions literature has traditionally devoted great attention to identifying and analysing events that are considered crucial to young people regarding their (short term) orientation to the future and wider narratives of the self. Such categories as 'turning points', 'critical moments', and 'crossroads' have been used to identify and explain the events around which young people take important decisions in order to realise the so-called t…
Rooted mobilities' in young people's narratives of the future
Youth research recognises that the struggles typical of the transition to adulthood can no longer be assumed to occur 'at home'. However, few investigations have focused on how the imagination of mobility shapes that which is not home yet but which may later become so. To address this lacuna, this article engages with how the imagination of the future of young people is entrenched with 'motility', namely, the possibility for a type of movement th…
Youth transitions as ‘wiki-transitions’ in youth policies platforms
In recent years, a number of youth-focused online platforms have emerged which, in different ways, seek to support young people across Europe in building pathways to independent adulthood. In this article, we draw on data from Edgeryders, a recent youth policy research project, to reflect on the extent to which online discussion platforms are useful instruments for understanding the challenges youth face in their transitions to independent adulth…
A place for mobility in metaphors of youth transitions
Metaphors are central in the study of youth; in fact, it has been argued that ‘youth’ itself could be considered a metaphor. In a recent assessment of transition-related metaphors, Cuervo and Wyn [2014. “Reflections on the Use of Spatial and Relational Metaphors in Youth Studies.” Journal of Youth Studies 17 (7): 901–915.] have noted that such metaphors as ‘niches’, ‘pathways’, ‘trajectories’ and ‘navigations’, often contain an element of movemen…
Julia Cook, Imagined futures. Hope, risk and uncertainty
Moratorium or waithood? Forms of time-taking and the changing shape of youth
Developing Erikson's concept of 'psychological moratorium' (1968), literature on youth transitions has a central focus in the procrastination of adult roles. Forms of time taking may either be erratic, or take more institutionalised and/or middle-class-oriented shapes such as 'gap years,' and they are generally justified by the aim of self-experimentation. However, on a different institutional level, they enter in contrast with the recent imperat…
Italian Youth in International Context
Italy is not a country for young people. Why? This book provides a unique and in-depth collection of empirical and theoretical material providing multiple answers to this question whilst investigating the living conditions of young people in Italy today.By bringing together a variety of approaches and methods, the authors of this collection analyze Italian youth through the lenses of three dimensions: ‘Activism, participation and citizenship’, ‘W…
Mobile moratorium? The case of young people undertaking international internships
This article explores a significant yet curiously understudied form of transnational mobility as practiced by the highly qualified in Europe, namely the international internship. We argue that an international internship can be an ambivalent stage within youth transitions. While possibly providing a potential point of entry into a ‘dream’ career path, the economic and emotional costs of such undertakings also need to be accounted for, including a…
Youth Collectivities
Forms of Collective Engagement in Youth Transitions
This collection sheds light on diverse forms of collective engagement among young people. Recent developments in youth studies, and the changing global shape of socio-economic conditions for young people, demand new approaches and ideas. Contributors focus on novel processes, practices and routines within youth collectivity in various contexts across the globe, including Indonesia, Spain, Italy, Norway and Poland. The chapters pay particular atte…
Special issue of International Journal of Social Welfare
The challenges of integrating perspectives in looking at youth transitions to employmentIn contemporary societies, young people face strong uncertainties upon transitioning into the labour market.Transitions from education to employment have become reversible, unstable, following scarcely predictable yo-yo trajectories (Biggart and Walther, 2006).The opportunity structuresas contexts of possibilities and constraints affecting the expected outcome…
‘È un’opzione che ho valutato da diverso tempo’
This contribution discusses the nuances of vulnerability that emerge from the relationship with the territory of secondary school students in a rural area of Sardinia. The article confronts the most updated definitions of vulnerability with current debates on youth, transitions to work and transitions to adulthood scholarship. Part of a wider project on the PCTO (still called in the narratives of the students with the old name of ‘alternance’), i…
‘It was like walking inside myself’
The recent Covid-19 pandemic has irrupted into youth’s lives and their relations to the city abruptly. Young people, in particular, make use of public space to forge relationships with peers for them significant: in this sense the city is a key source of identity in their journey towards adulthood. The city can be thought of as a space of their own, in a continuous process of co-construction of “their” city on the one hand, and the expression of …
Erasmus students’ motivations in motion
This paper looks at youth mobility as an ongoing, dynamic, processual experience in the making of an educational trajectory. By exploring the experiences of students who have undertaken more than one mobility experience under the Erasmus + program, we reflect on how underlying motivations change over the course of subsequent mobility experiences. In contrast to existing research, where the focus has been on reported motivations for one-off mobili…
Sociology (24 obras) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (22 obras) · Political science (15 obras) · Psychology (11 obras) · Gender Studies (9 obras) · Law (8 obras) · Social science (8 obras) · Employment and Welfare Studies (7 obras) · Public relations (7 obras) · Art (6 obras)