Enzo Colombo
Biographic Data
| ID | 258118 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Enzo Colombo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Enzo |
| FAMILY NAME | Colombo |
| SIGNATURE | COLOMBO E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Milan |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7231-5819 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Hegemonies of the social imaginary: An analytical conceptualization
The concept of social imaginary is central in the social sciences to grasp the cultural dimension of social and political action. The classic works of Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor have traced – in their difference and complementarity – the theoretical contours within which to frame the concept of social imaginary, also in temporal terms. This article critically reviews the idea of these two authors to underline the importance of consi…
The social imaginary as a battlefield: Resources for a critical thought
This article introduces a conflictual perspective to the study of social imaginaries, emphasizing their capacity to represent spaces of social critique. Critically revisiting the now classic conceptions of Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, the article proposes to look at the social imaginary as a battlefield for the hegemony of shared meaning and the definition of social reality. It engages in a theoretical analysis that foregrounds the p…
Navigating political emotions and agency among italian youth in the post-pandemic urban landscape
This study explores attitudes toward civic involvement in public life in the post-pandemic context, informed by recurring political emotions among young individuals between 16 and 26 years of age living in the metropolitan area of Milan and its hinterland. Drawing on 66 in-depth interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024 with young participants, the article traces the political emotions of this generation of under-30s in response to multiple cris…
The rumors of action: Young people and reflexive dynamics in urban peripheries in southern Brazil
The article addresses the reflexivity notion, aiming a contextualized analysis in urban peripheries from southern Brazil. Therefore, the purpose is to understand how young people develop reflexive dynamics in socially vulnerable contexts, appropriating Martuccelli's contributions as references. The research included different techniques to dialogue with youngsters in Porto Alegre/RS city, where narrative-interactional dynamics with aesthetic-iden…
When the war strikes back: TikTok’s domestication of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict among youth
This article explores how the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is represented through videos circulating on TikTok and how the consumption of this content impacts young people’s imaginary of war. After 2 years since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the centrality of TikTok in the communication around this conflict has become apparent. In this study, we are interested in the ‘domesticating’ effect produced by the circulation and consumption of content …
Enchanted realism: Representations of self-fulfilment among Italian youth after the pandemic
Our aim in this article is to analyse youth aspirations for self-fulfilment through work in the interplay between individualization and self-entrepreneurship. Theoretically, we discuss the main approaches of individualization and self-government in contemporary youth studies. Empirically, we focus on urban youth in the post-pandemic context, in the Italian city of Milan, paying specific attention to the transformation of their aspirations and soc…
Configurations of otherness and globalization of the Othering Machine
The aim of this introductory article is to shed light on the complexities and ambiguities of the definitions, uses, and categorizations of what is termed ‘racism' or alternatively, in a more flexible and protean manner, ‘othering'. However, while racism and otherness have been forged within the history of modernity, coloniality and capitalism, the current concreteness and linguistic use of these notions is a matter of discussion also within post-…
Becoming individuals: Processes of Individualization and Reflexivity
The article aims to show how young adults (starting with empirical research in Italy, but with the aspiration to highlight more diffuse phenomena among youth growing in the constant experience of the 'crisis') face the widespread injunction to be active, creative, flexible, and independent, that is, to be entrepreneurs of themselves. Young people born at the end of the last century have grown up in the midst of continuous crises - economic, healt…
Framing Social Theory: Reassembling the Lexicon of Contemporary Social Sciences
Starting from the Latourian first definition of technoscience, the chapter follows the evolution of this concept within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). This offers the occasion to discuss some crucial distinctions – such as science and technology, science and society, human and not human – that are usually assumed by social sciences as an implicit starting point for their analysis. Technoscience rather invites to rethink their …
Individualization and Individualism: Facets and Turning Points of the Entrepreneurial Self among Young People in Italy
The aim of this article is to show how young people in Italy deal with the structural injunction to become individuals. While there is a substantial number of works on how institutions converge in promoting individualization and an 'entrepreneurial self', in this article we investigate how young people give shape and meaning to social relations in the framework of the injunction to become autonomous entrepreneurs of themselves. The research prese…
Human Rights-inspired Governmentality: Covid-19 through a Human Dignity Perspective
The paper aims to reconstruct the debate over the pandemic in Italy to highlight the logic of the discourse that guided the various voices. The two governmentalities that have monopolized the public and political debate are biomedical and economic. The former brought the defense of biological life ( zoé) as the ultimate element of truth and legitimacy of the government's action. The latter, based the 'true' justification upon a careful cost-benef…
Towards the global social sciences? Some preliminary reflections
The transformations brought about by globalization processes have put social sciences under stress. Several voices, especially from the so-called ‘South’, claim a radical revision – if not total rejection – of the (Western) social sciences. It has become evident that the tool-kit of concepts and method inherited from modernity seems incapable of grasping the complexity and variability of current social experience, characterized by a plurality of …
Youth and the Politics of the Present: Coping with Complexity and Ambivalence
This chapter investigates the link between uncertainty in the labour market and young adults’ autonomy in Italy and Estonia. It focuses on young adults leaving the parental home and being able to financially provide for their own needs, highlighting the coping strategies youth put in place in different institutional contexts. The results come from a comparative qualitative analysis lasting three years in the frame of the EXCEPT project − Horizon …
A generational attitude: Young adults facing the economic crisis in Milan
For almost 10 years there has been talk of the economic crisis affecting the European area, with more evident effects in the Mediterranean countries. Yet the expression ‘economic crisis’ has become too wide and blurred to be useful for describing how the current socio-economic conjuncture is affecting different categories of young people in different ways. Precariousness and reduced job opportunities, with their consequences for social mobility, …
Globalizing the Classroom: Innovative Approach to National and International Learning
This essay examines an innovative approach to teaching across international and cultural boundaries and evaluates the experience in a course on Globalization, Social Justice, and Human Rights, co-taught collaboratively by faculty from different campuses and countries since 2011. This course was created to address unmet needs in the traditional higher educational systems. These include, but are not limited to, lack of cross-cultural and interdisci…
Multiculturalisms: An overview of multicultural debates in western societies
This article examines how debates about multiculturalism evolved in western societies. In the first part, it presents the different meanings of the term 'multiculturalism' when it applies to diverse types of cultural difference within society: native and sub-state national groups, discriminated groups within society and immigrants. Highlighting the polysemy of the term, three theoretical approaches to multicultural issues are introduced and criti…
Multiple Identities: Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership
Children of Immigrants in a Globalized World: A Generational Experience
Introduction The Future of the Second Generation in a Globalized World Framing Contexts and Actors A Specific Generational Location Multiple Belonging Complex Identifications Children of Immigrants in Search of Justness
Children of Immigrants in a Globalized World
This book explores the generational experience of children of immigrants growing up in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, comparing the lives of Mediterranean youths with those from
Le multiculturalisme quotidien des enfants d’immigrés en Italie
Citizenship and multiple belonging. Representations of inclusion, identification and participation among children of immigrants in Italy
This article aims to explore how children of immigrants enrolled in higher secondary schools in Milan conceive and speak about citizenship. It illustrates how the formal, participatory and identity dimensions of citizenship come to be articulated in a complex and changeable way in relation to discourses and contexts. In particular, it attempts to look more closely at the transformations of belonging, which today seems to be composed of different …
Crossing Differences: How Young Children of Immigrants Keep Everyday Multiculturalism Alive
This paper examines how children of immigrants use difference in their everyday relations. After a brief critical discussion of how difference is usually conceived in the actual debate about multiculturalism, it proposes a sociological definition of difference stressing its ‘practical’, mundane, and contextual uses. Informed by theoretical approaches to difference which emphasise its political nature, the paper explores the mundane and continuous…
Different But Not Stranger: Everyday Collective Identifications among Adolescent Children of Immigrants in Italy
This article deals with the problem of the future of the second generation in Italy. After a brief overview of the main perspectives currently adopted to theorise the future of the second and subsequent generations, the Italian situation is introduced. Our objective is to see whether and how the observations made especially in contexts with a long tradition of immigration, where migration processes are now culturally and institutionally embedded,…
Different But Not Stranger: Everyday Collective Identifications among Adolescent Children of Immigrants in Italy
This article deals with the problem of the future of the second generation in Italy. After a brief overview of the main perspectives currently adopted to theorise the future of the second and subsequent generations, the Italian situation is introduced. Our objective is to see whether and how the observations made especially in contexts with a long tradition of immigration, where migration processes are now culturally and institutionally embedded,…
Citizenship and multiple belonging. Representations of inclusion, identification and participation among children of immigrants in Italy
This article aims to explore how children of immigrants enrolled in higher secondary schools in Milan conceive and speak about citizenship. It illustrates how the formal, participatory and identity dimensions of citizenship come to be articulated in a complex and changeable way in relation to discourses and contexts. In particular, it attempts to look more closely at the transformations of belonging, which today seems to be composed of different …
Multiculturalisms: An overview of multicultural debates in western societies
This article examines how debates about multiculturalism evolved in western societies. In the first part, it presents the different meanings of the term 'multiculturalism' when it applies to diverse types of cultural difference within society: native and sub-state national groups, discriminated groups within society and immigrants. Highlighting the polysemy of the term, three theoretical approaches to multicultural issues are introduced and criti…
Crossing Differences: How Young Children of Immigrants Keep Everyday Multiculturalism Alive
This paper examines how children of immigrants use difference in their everyday relations. After a brief critical discussion of how difference is usually conceived in the actual debate about multiculturalism, it proposes a sociological definition of difference stressing its ‘practical’, mundane, and contextual uses. Informed by theoretical approaches to difference which emphasise its political nature, the paper explores the mundane and continuous…
Individualization and Individualism: Facets and Turning Points of the Entrepreneurial Self among Young People in Italy
The aim of this article is to show how young people in Italy deal with the structural injunction to become individuals. While there is a substantial number of works on how institutions converge in promoting individualization and an 'entrepreneurial self', in this article we investigate how young people give shape and meaning to social relations in the framework of the injunction to become autonomous entrepreneurs of themselves. The research prese…
A generational attitude: Young adults facing the economic crisis in Milan
For almost 10 years there has been talk of the economic crisis affecting the European area, with more evident effects in the Mediterranean countries. Yet the expression ‘economic crisis’ has become too wide and blurred to be useful for describing how the current socio-economic conjuncture is affecting different categories of young people in different ways. Precariousness and reduced job opportunities, with their consequences for social mobility, …
Human Rights-inspired Governmentality: Covid-19 through a Human Dignity Perspective
The paper aims to reconstruct the debate over the pandemic in Italy to highlight the logic of the discourse that guided the various voices. The two governmentalities that have monopolized the public and political debate are biomedical and economic. The former brought the defense of biological life ( zoé) as the ultimate element of truth and legitimacy of the government's action. The latter, based the 'true' justification upon a careful cost-benef…
When the war strikes back: TikTok’s domestication of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict among youth
This article explores how the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is represented through videos circulating on TikTok and how the consumption of this content impacts young people’s imaginary of war. After 2 years since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the centrality of TikTok in the communication around this conflict has become apparent. In this study, we are interested in the ‘domesticating’ effect produced by the circulation and consumption of content …
Globalizing the Classroom: Innovative Approach to National and International Learning
This essay examines an innovative approach to teaching across international and cultural boundaries and evaluates the experience in a course on Globalization, Social Justice, and Human Rights, co-taught collaboratively by faculty from different campuses and countries since 2011. This course was created to address unmet needs in the traditional higher educational systems. These include, but are not limited to, lack of cross-cultural and interdisci…
Different But Not Stranger: Everyday Collective Identifications among Adolescent Children of Immigrants in Italy
This article deals with the problem of the future of the second generation in Italy. After a brief overview of the main perspectives currently adopted to theorise the future of the second and subsequent generations, the Italian situation is introduced. Our objective is to see whether and how the observations made especially in contexts with a long tradition of immigration, where migration processes are now culturally and institutionally embedded,…
Crossing Differences: How Young Children of Immigrants Keep Everyday Multiculturalism Alive
This paper examines how children of immigrants use difference in their everyday relations. After a brief critical discussion of how difference is usually conceived in the actual debate about multiculturalism, it proposes a sociological definition of difference stressing its ‘practical’, mundane, and contextual uses. Informed by theoretical approaches to difference which emphasise its political nature, the paper explores the mundane and continuous…
Citizenship and multiple belonging. Representations of inclusion, identification and participation among children of immigrants in Italy
This article aims to explore how children of immigrants enrolled in higher secondary schools in Milan conceive and speak about citizenship. It illustrates how the formal, participatory and identity dimensions of citizenship come to be articulated in a complex and changeable way in relation to discourses and contexts. In particular, it attempts to look more closely at the transformations of belonging, which today seems to be composed of different …
Children of Immigrants in a Globalized World: A Generational Experience
Introduction The Future of the Second Generation in a Globalized World Framing Contexts and Actors A Specific Generational Location Multiple Belonging Complex Identifications Children of Immigrants in Search of Justness
Children of Immigrants in a Globalized World
This book explores the generational experience of children of immigrants growing up in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, comparing the lives of Mediterranean youths with those from
Le multiculturalisme quotidien des enfants d’immigrés en Italie
Multiple Identities: Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership
Globalizing the Classroom: Innovative Approach to National and International Learning
This essay examines an innovative approach to teaching across international and cultural boundaries and evaluates the experience in a course on Globalization, Social Justice, and Human Rights, co-taught collaboratively by faculty from different campuses and countries since 2011. This course was created to address unmet needs in the traditional higher educational systems. These include, but are not limited to, lack of cross-cultural and interdisci…
Multiculturalisms: An overview of multicultural debates in western societies
This article examines how debates about multiculturalism evolved in western societies. In the first part, it presents the different meanings of the term 'multiculturalism' when it applies to diverse types of cultural difference within society: native and sub-state national groups, discriminated groups within society and immigrants. Highlighting the polysemy of the term, three theoretical approaches to multicultural issues are introduced and criti…
A generational attitude: Young adults facing the economic crisis in Milan
For almost 10 years there has been talk of the economic crisis affecting the European area, with more evident effects in the Mediterranean countries. Yet the expression ‘economic crisis’ has become too wide and blurred to be useful for describing how the current socio-economic conjuncture is affecting different categories of young people in different ways. Precariousness and reduced job opportunities, with their consequences for social mobility, …
Towards the global social sciences? Some preliminary reflections
The transformations brought about by globalization processes have put social sciences under stress. Several voices, especially from the so-called ‘South’, claim a radical revision – if not total rejection – of the (Western) social sciences. It has become evident that the tool-kit of concepts and method inherited from modernity seems incapable of grasping the complexity and variability of current social experience, characterized by a plurality of …
Youth and the Politics of the Present: Coping with Complexity and Ambivalence
This chapter investigates the link between uncertainty in the labour market and young adults’ autonomy in Italy and Estonia. It focuses on young adults leaving the parental home and being able to financially provide for their own needs, highlighting the coping strategies youth put in place in different institutional contexts. The results come from a comparative qualitative analysis lasting three years in the frame of the EXCEPT project − Horizon …
Human Rights-inspired Governmentality: Covid-19 through a Human Dignity Perspective
The paper aims to reconstruct the debate over the pandemic in Italy to highlight the logic of the discourse that guided the various voices. The two governmentalities that have monopolized the public and political debate are biomedical and economic. The former brought the defense of biological life ( zoé) as the ultimate element of truth and legitimacy of the government's action. The latter, based the 'true' justification upon a careful cost-benef…
Framing Social Theory: Reassembling the Lexicon of Contemporary Social Sciences
Starting from the Latourian first definition of technoscience, the chapter follows the evolution of this concept within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). This offers the occasion to discuss some crucial distinctions – such as science and technology, science and society, human and not human – that are usually assumed by social sciences as an implicit starting point for their analysis. Technoscience rather invites to rethink their …
Individualization and Individualism: Facets and Turning Points of the Entrepreneurial Self among Young People in Italy
The aim of this article is to show how young people in Italy deal with the structural injunction to become individuals. While there is a substantial number of works on how institutions converge in promoting individualization and an 'entrepreneurial self', in this article we investigate how young people give shape and meaning to social relations in the framework of the injunction to become autonomous entrepreneurs of themselves. The research prese…
Configurations of otherness and globalization of the Othering Machine
The aim of this introductory article is to shed light on the complexities and ambiguities of the definitions, uses, and categorizations of what is termed ‘racism' or alternatively, in a more flexible and protean manner, ‘othering'. However, while racism and otherness have been forged within the history of modernity, coloniality and capitalism, the current concreteness and linguistic use of these notions is a matter of discussion also within post-…
Becoming individuals: Processes of Individualization and Reflexivity
The article aims to show how young adults (starting with empirical research in Italy, but with the aspiration to highlight more diffuse phenomena among youth growing in the constant experience of the 'crisis') face the widespread injunction to be active, creative, flexible, and independent, that is, to be entrepreneurs of themselves. Young people born at the end of the last century have grown up in the midst of continuous crises - economic, healt…
When the war strikes back: TikTok’s domestication of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict among youth
This article explores how the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is represented through videos circulating on TikTok and how the consumption of this content impacts young people’s imaginary of war. After 2 years since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the centrality of TikTok in the communication around this conflict has become apparent. In this study, we are interested in the ‘domesticating’ effect produced by the circulation and consumption of content …
Enchanted realism: Representations of self-fulfilment among Italian youth after the pandemic
Our aim in this article is to analyse youth aspirations for self-fulfilment through work in the interplay between individualization and self-entrepreneurship. Theoretically, we discuss the main approaches of individualization and self-government in contemporary youth studies. Empirically, we focus on urban youth in the post-pandemic context, in the Italian city of Milan, paying specific attention to the transformation of their aspirations and soc…
The rumors of action: Young people and reflexive dynamics in urban peripheries in southern Brazil
The article addresses the reflexivity notion, aiming a contextualized analysis in urban peripheries from southern Brazil. Therefore, the purpose is to understand how young people develop reflexive dynamics in socially vulnerable contexts, appropriating Martuccelli's contributions as references. The research included different techniques to dialogue with youngsters in Porto Alegre/RS city, where narrative-interactional dynamics with aesthetic-iden…
Hegemonies of the social imaginary: An analytical conceptualization
The concept of social imaginary is central in the social sciences to grasp the cultural dimension of social and political action. The classic works of Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor have traced – in their difference and complementarity – the theoretical contours within which to frame the concept of social imaginary, also in temporal terms. This article critically reviews the idea of these two authors to underline the importance of consi…
The social imaginary as a battlefield: Resources for a critical thought
This article introduces a conflictual perspective to the study of social imaginaries, emphasizing their capacity to represent spaces of social critique. Critically revisiting the now classic conceptions of Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, the article proposes to look at the social imaginary as a battlefield for the hegemony of shared meaning and the definition of social reality. It engages in a theoretical analysis that foregrounds the p…
Navigating political emotions and agency among italian youth in the post-pandemic urban landscape
This study explores attitudes toward civic involvement in public life in the post-pandemic context, informed by recurring political emotions among young individuals between 16 and 26 years of age living in the metropolitan area of Milan and its hinterland. Drawing on 66 in-depth interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024 with young participants, the article traces the political emotions of this generation of under-30s in response to multiple cris…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Immigration (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works)