Journal of Modern Italian Studies

ISSN: 1354-571X (Print) 1469-9583 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmis20

Youth as a metaphor: an interview with Carmen

Leccardi

Carmen Leccardi, Valentina Cuzzocrea & Barbara Giovanna Bello

To cite this article: Carmen Leccardi, Valentina Cuzzocrea & Barbara Giovanna Bello (2018)
Youth as a metaphor: an interview with Carmen Leccardi, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 23:1,
8-23, DOI: 10.1080/1354571X.2017.1409522

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2017.1409522

Published online: 16 Jan 2018.

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Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2018
VOL. 23, NO. 1, 8–23
https://doi.org/10.1080/1354571X.2017.1409522

INTERVIEW

Youth as a metaphor: an interview with Carmen

Leccardi
Carmen Leccardia, Valentina Cuzzocreab and Barbara Giovanna Belloc
a
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca; bDepartment of
Social Sciences and Institutions, University of Cagliari; cDepartment of Law ‘Cesare Beccaria’,
University of Milan

ABSTRACT
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 these issues diachronically, following and
commenting some salient aspects of Italian history that have had an impact on
how the lives of young people have unfolded, among them social movements,
policies and labour market fluctuations. Revisiting and updating the notion
of uncertainty in young people’s lives, the interview concludes that youth can
be considered as a metaphor particularly able to capture contemporary social
changes.

KEYWORDS  Youth; Italian research; temporality; uncertainty

Valentina Cuzzocrea: One of the aims of this Special Issue is to explore the
ways in which young people living in Italy today are a distinctive group, in
that they share specific issues and identify with specific models. You have long
researched young people in Italy and written extensively and authoritatively
about the sense of uncertainty that this group faces, which is made evident in
the way they manage their time and envision their future. We would be thrilled
to begin this interview with an insight into how research on temporalities has
intersected with research on youth in Italy, and how this group has come to be
illustrated by this strand of research.
Carmen Leccardi: At the beginning of the 1980s, when the centrality of social
movements came to an end in Italy, youth research started focusing on the
new relationship between young people and the private sphere of life. That
was a sort of reaction to the long, active involvement of youth in public issues,

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES   9

Figure 1. Carmen Leccardi. Reproduced with permission

an involvement that began at the end of the 1960s. This new lack of interest in
the public sphere was called riflusso, literally ‘reflux’, the movement typical of
an ebbing tide. Private relations, the emotional domain and personal identity
issues became an important centre of interest in youth research. As a youth
researcher, I started at that time to study young people’s temporalities: historical,
biographical and everyday temporalities. At that time, I was part of a research
team at the University of Pavia, coordinated by Alessandro Cavalli.1 Temporality,
i.e. the way in which young people reworked time in society, was considered
a transversal dimension that connected different levels of experience: in the
labour market, in education, in the family, with peers.
In Europe – I discovered later – ours were the first studies on youth that
were carried out through the study of temporalities. Frankly speaking, for the
team members it has been a fascinating journey, which gave rise to a number
of different areas of interest and further research. We started in the last years
of the 1970s, and the (first) book, Il tempo dei giovani (Youths’ Temporality) was
published in 1985 (see Cavalli 1985). For more than four years, the research
team had the opportunity to investigate the new meanings of participation for
young people, as well as the redefinition of what a ‘private’ experience was for
them. Young people were still ‘actors of social change’, as we are now used to
calling them, but in an unexpected way, far from the collective discourse that
dominated the previous decade. Meanwhile, we had the opportunity, through
that research, to focus on the new uncertainties of the journey into the future;
10   C. LECCARDI ET AL.

a journey, for young people, related less and less to the institutional world,
including political institutions. A second study on young people’s temporalities,
in this case devoted to young women, was carried out by the same research
team soon after.2 That was for me the first opportunity to realize empirically the
imprint of gender on the construction of temporal experiences.

Barbara Giovanna Bello: Reflecting on the findings of the research you have
been involved in over those years, how does the study of time contribute to
understanding the conditions of youth in general?

Carmen Leccardi: As I said, that research was a sort of starting point for the
research on youth that I carried out during the following years. In fact, through
temporality, cultural and symbolic aspects of social life can be easily connected
with structural dimensions. Youth, time and temporality are strictly intertwined.
On the one hand, youth is temporal because it begins and ends at a certain
point in the life cycle; on the other, it is through their relationship with the time
of social institutions that young people define identity. The way in which they
rework these two aspects is also temporal: it can be constructed as a project, it
was above all a life project until a few decades ago, or as a situation to be dealt
with in an everyday framework, as seems to have happened more and more
in these last years. Anyway, as a scholar of cultural sociology, I have to say that
the relationship between young people and time sheds an important light on
their cultures, making them more intelligible (think, for example, of the at-risk
cultures and the search for experiences related to the refusal of limits that are
so widespread today). To sum up, the relationship with time and temporality
is important on different levels, and it really helps us in understanding what
being young means, young people’s subjectivities as well as youth as a struc-
tural condition.

Valentina Cuzzocrea: How do you think this has shaped the way we study
youth today, in Italy and beyond?

Carmen Leccardi: The study of youth through time and temporality helped me
also in understanding that the sociology of youth has to be considered a general
sociology. As a matter of fact, studying youth through time meant considering all
the dimensions of institutional life and their connections, considering everyday
life and forms of participation. By taking temporality into consideration, no part
of social life, starting from work to intimate life, could be considered a foreign
matter for youth scholars. It must be added, on that point, that in the 1980s,
when I began my research, academic sociology was not as heavily divided into
so many autonomous fields as it is today. Just one example: in the European
Sociological Association there are today 37 different specific research fields,
categorized as autonomous Research Networks.3 So, in those years it was much
easier to approach youth research in ways that embraced the study of labour
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES   11

market dynamics and, say, subcultures that were not considered as separate as
they seem to be today.
In addition, it should be said that during this period the study of youth
was very much related to critical thinking. After the long years in which youth
movements had played a central role in social life, studying young people, even
though in the years of ‘reflux’, was related to notions of utopia, to the possibility
of thinking of a different future. In that sense, the new interest in everyday life
was also an interest in the new forms of participation, to be discovered and
thoroughly studied. It was precisely in the 1980s that a new research network
devoted to the study of everyday life, and strictly connected to the study of
youth and social movements, was established within the Italian Sociological
Association.4
What I want to underline here, therefore, is that the study of youth through
time opened up a real horizon of relations and interconnections between differ-
ent fields of social analysis. Here, of course, I do not want to go into the typology
of young people’s temporal experiences that were constructed as a result of the
research. I simply wish to focus on the fact that already several decades ago the
meaning of youth was changing, in particular the idea of a linear transition to
adulthood, and the study of young people’s temporal experiences made the
point extremely clear. The so-called yo-yo transitions, as they were named a
few years ago (Biggart and Walther 2006), synthesize well that idea of a break
in the linearity of the transition, something we take for granted in our current
studies. In the new century, we are used to seeing how this loss of linearity is
connected with different class positions, ethnic backgrounds, gender, age and
so on – and we use to this purpose the concept of intersectionality. At the very
beginning of the 1980s, that process was the germ of an idea.

Barbara Giovanna Bello: How has this scenario changed more recently?

Carmen Leccardi: I do believe that the limits and potentialities of this specific
youth experience, prolonged, fragmented, reversible in its steps, are strictly
intertwined. There is creativity among young people in dealing with these
experiences, not only loss of hopes and projects, as is usually claimed when
discussing Southern European youth in particular in the new century. In my
view, it is sometimes difficult to separate one level from the other, the level of
the difficulties and the level of potentialities. For example, think about the pres-
ent situation of high youth unemployment in Italy. In the autumn of 2016, the
youth unemployment rate is approximately 40% (around double the European
average), the third highest percentage of youth unemployment after Greece
and Spain, triple the rate in Britain. The rate of young people in a NEET condi-
tion (not in employment, education or training) in Italy is also especially high
(approximately 26%), ten points higher than the European average. In a nutshell,
we have many economic and social disadvantages as regards the relationship
12   C. LECCARDI ET AL.

between young people and the labour market and the so-called transition from
education to work. Despite all that, we can note the resilience of young people
in this difficult situation.

Barbara Giovanna Bello: Could you give us some examples of this?

Carmen Leccardi: For example, they do not give up the possibility of facing
an uncertain future through some form of project. Projects can, for instance,
concern only some aspect of life – this is particularly true for young women
(as in the 1931 Marienthal study, women seem to be able to reconstruct more
easily than men forms of temporality starting from everyday life; see Jahoda,
Lazarsfeld and Zeisel 1974); they can become short and very short projects –
even a few months – avoiding the feeling of being closed in the present. Or, in
some cases, young people feel free to construct a relationship with the future
based upon the decision to ‘let things happen’; in other cases, they theorize the
possibility to seize opportunities as soon as they present themselves in everyday
life. Of course, the possibility of transforming these forms of potentially positive
relations with the future into effective opportunities of controlling it very much
depends on their economic, cultural and social capital. Nevertheless, as research
indicates, in many cases even young people in a NEET condition have the feeling
that, all in all, the future is not completely beyond their control. Although in our
century the present has become the paramount temporal dimension, also due
to the hegemony of ‘information capitalism’, the future remains for many young
people a challenge, a time-space to be shaped. In my opinion, these tendencies
are also the result of an opposition to the ‘socialization to presentification’, which
in the last two decades or so became the main form of temporal socialization
of the so-called digital generation. Young people claim to have the right to
aspire, as Appadurai (2004) says; they wish a personal future to be personally
controlled and shaped by one’s own aspirations. In other words, many young
people construct a sort of strategic way of dealing with uncertainty; they do not
simply accept it and do not simply rely on instantaneous forms of gratification.
Things are more complex than that. In one way or another, young people must
also connect with institutions, even though for the most part social institutions
today seem unable to transmit a sense of temporal continuity. Currently, the
classic phenomenological idea that institutions must be considered ‘models for
action’ appears to be obsolete.

Valentina Cuzzocrea: In fact, it would be interesting if you could ‘actualize’,

along this line, the studies you have been involved in throughout the years to
the present conditions.

Carmen Leccardi: Even more than thirty years after the publication of Il tempo
dei giovani, the topic of young people’s temporalities, the multiple ways in which
they construct forms of relations with the past, the present and the future,
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES   13

remains a strategic issue. Perhaps in the 1980s, we were just seeing the starting
point of this difficult relation; today these difficulties are a paramount reality.
Today, young people must construct the future in the present. I do not mean
that they have to relate to their present having in mind its instrumental capacity
to construct the future according to twentieth-century tradition – the so-called
‘postponement of gratification’ pattern. Medium- to long-term projects seem
to be rather unrealistic in the contemporary uncertain landscape. However, in
the second decade of the new century, young people, as I already stated, do
not give up the idea of the future – and even of the plan. On the one hand,
they reduce the temporal horizon of projects; on the other hand, they look at
the present not only in relation to the growing ‘presentification’ of social life.
Rather, they try to cope actively with the contraction of temporal horizons. For
example, the quality of the everyday seems to gain increasing importance. The
quality of time spent with friends, with a partner, and of course online becomes
an indicator of the quality of biographical time on the whole. Everyday time is
considered ‘my time’, the time you can make use of, that you can waste, that you
can spend as you wish – at least in principle. In a nutshell, this is the time that
you can personally control, which is perhaps the main reason for its centrality.

Valentina Cuzzocrea: Don’t you think that the new Italian labour legislation
(the so-called Jobs Act) that came into force in 2015 may have institutionalized
young people’s procrastination in thinking of their own future and, in doing so,
has delegitimized today’s individual responsibility because of the uncertainty
of what will happen tomorrow? Just to take an example, data show that the
Jobs Act has increased the differences between workers who are protected by
law and workers who are very poorly protected by law, ‘i.e. usually the youth’.

Carmen Leccardi: Indeed, young people trying to construct the future in the
present through the quality of everyday life is also the result of changes in their
relationship to the labour market. Young people must face the idea of com-
pletely unstable work, precarious jobs, temporary jobs… for example, being
paid with vouchers means that young people cannot link a job with the idea
of continuity. The quality of time has to be found outside work, outside the
relationship with institutions. My idea is that a number of young people try to
cope with this instability in a creative way – for example, substituting the very
idea of ‘future’ understood as a ‘long time’ with that of an extended present.
Through this important concept, some years ago now Helga Nowotny already
underlined the substitution, in relation to technological innovation, of the ‘tra-
ditional future’ with a new temporal dimension, that of the extended present
(see Nowotny 1996). This particular present, in an epoch increasingly fast and
overloaded with choices, as Adam and Groves (2007) say, incorporates the future
and takes its place. On several occasions, in research on young people’s temporal
experiences, this concept revealed itself to be of strategic importance. It helped
in showing how young people used their present activities as a sort of thread
14   C. LECCARDI ET AL.

to forge bridges towards the future. For example, if they engage in education,
and the educational project will end at a certain point in time, or if they are in a
temporary job and the contract will end sooner or later, their temporal horizon
can be related to the extension of those activities of an institutional character.
We can then say that theirs is an extended present that takes the place of the
representational idea of the future we are used to referring to, an open-ended
time.

Valentina Cuzzocrea: Yet, studying young people in Italy today in order to

understand contemporary Italy also prompts us to reflect on structural defi-
ciencies and how they might be overcome.

Barbara Giovanna Bello: Perhaps we could now move on to a discussion of

young people living outside Italy, to other European countries. A comparative
perspective, we think, could be especially useful to understanding mobility in
today’s Italy.

Carmen Leccardi: I completely agree. The first dimension I would like to under-
line is what young people all over Europe share; the second is the differences.
The first aspect relates to social life in a high-speed society, and I take here
Hartmut Rosa’s (2013) analysis of this process. In Europe, as well as in other
Western countries, for young people this means facing a specific contradiction:
life runs faster and faster, whether in economic, political or cultural life, as do
everyday rhythms, while the transition to adulthood becomes slower, longer
and increasingly fragmented. This means that young people, young men and
young women in a slightly different way, must face a common condition of
temporal pressure without having at their disposal cultural and social models
apt to control this speed. This difference is in part due to their different biolog-
ical times and the different awareness of the plurality of times of life that they
seem to show.
The second dimension, the relationship between young Italians and other
young Europeans, forces us to go back to national social characteristics. I do
believe that in Italy, perhaps the most important burden that hinders young
people’s chances of coping with uncertainty is the weakness of the welfare state.
The shield they have against uncertainty (against unemployment, the lack of
autonomous housing opportunities with reasonable prices and so on) is that
of the family, not of the state. As a consequence, inequality in the structure of
opportunities for young Italians is stronger than in those European countries
where, the great depression notwithstanding, welfare protection can still be con-
sidered a meaningful presence in their lives. In Italy, the very long cohabitation
with parents is closely related to economic conditions. For example, while the
‘long family’ (young adults, 25–34 years old, still living with their families) involves
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES   15

approximately 45% of young adults in Northern Italy, the percentage rises to 55%
in the Southern and poorer part of the country, where unemployment is higher.
While in other European countries young people enjoy an autonomous life in
these years of their lives, in Italy half of those between 20 and 30 years of age
who are not yet married still live with their parents (according to ISTAT 2016, the
national statistical institute, the general figure is impressive: approximately 7 mil-
lion young people under 35 continue cohabitation with their parents). Although
these young people can enjoy a relative existential autonomy at home, the differ-
ence between this experience and that of their European peers is remarkable. Of
course, it is necessary to relate this situation with the difficult position of Italian
youth in the labour market. I have already mentioned the situation of young
people in a NEET condition. On this topic, it is perhaps worth recalling what the
2015 OECD report on NEETs underlines ‘Carcillo et al 2015’. A terrible scar on
young people’s lives was created by the great recession, significantly increasing
the number of unemployed as well as of NEETs. Coming back to a comparative
view, we can say that Southern European youth face a more difficult situation
than their European peers in the Nordic countries and elsewhere.

Barbara Giovanna Bello: When compared to other European countries, Italy

has only recently become a country of immigration. How do you see so-called
‘second generations’ of young migrants now living in Italy coping with imag-
ining their future?

Carmen Leccardi: We are talking about around one million young people under
20, most of them born in Italy from migrant parents. In their case, the social
uncertainty we have been talking about is much stronger. For example, accord-
ing to recent data (see ISTAT 2016)5, if these young people are asked whether
or not they feel themselves to be Italian, around one-third are unable to give
an answer. For them, uncertainties are doubling, and this worsens the already
foggy landscape in which youth finds itself. In my opinion, however, politicians
and researchers should avoid simply representing young people as ‘victims’.
Rather, we have the duty to understand, and analyse, how young people – men
and women, migrants or natives – try to overcome this structural disadvantage.
My opinion is that they do that with more creativity, more imagination, more
cultural openness than is usually required by more advantaged European young
people. New forms of social and political participation, the use of social net-
work sites, relations with the arts (art, for instance, can be considered a way of
expressing one’s subjectivity in this difficult social landscape) become aspects
of the strategies that young people formulate to cope with the social scenario
in which they are obliged to grow up.
Even though they continue to suffer discrimination along their educational
path, they seem to live in less shortened temporal horizons. Having, for example,
medium-term projects seems to be a normal experience in their lives; they are
16   C. LECCARDI ET AL.

also especially open to participation, to constructing forms of solidarity and

of cooperation. Not by chance are all these dimensions considered especially
worthy by European youth policies.

Barbara Giovanna Bello: Renzi’s government (22 February 2014–7 December

2016) featured an unprecedented number of ministers under 40, seemingly in
contrast to evidence of youth disengagement in the field of politics. This inter-
generational change has brought with it a new communication style based on
the web (by contrast with TV communications, which characterized the previous
Berlusconi era). How do you think these changes may impact on youth partic-
ipation in the formal political life of the country?

Carmen Leccardi: In this context I believe that the concept of ‘individualized

collective action’ proposed by Micheletti (2003) at the beginning of the new
century can be considered an important reference point. As Micheletti under-
lines, in the quickly changing political landscape in which we live today young
people seem actively engaged in rethinking politics (for example through con-
sumers’ engagement). If we conceive politics as a way of controlling change,
when social change becomes faster and faster, as is the case today, political
action also changes its meanings and forms of expression. This is the reason
why, in my view, social sciences should be highly interested in understanding
these transformations. In particular, social scientists should avoid relating to
points of view on social and political participation that belong to the last cen-
tury. As a matter of fact, in such a highly individualized world as the current
one, there is a growing need to focus on an everyday basis. This implies more
self-responsibility, the opposite side of the coin where self-fulfilment is drawn.
This creates new obligations for individuals and a drift towards the possible
solution of collective problems starting from one’s own choices in everyday
life – one’s home, one’s neighbourhood, and other arenas where the process of
taking responsibility individually is central. All in all, individualized collective
action means the search for a ‘good life’ outside collective structures or polit-
ical parties. Every person is responsible for the issues connected with one’s
life, and this is especially true for young people. As a result, unconventional
participation and innovative approaches and repertoires of action are chosen;
forms of mobilization are invented and innovative forms of political experience
increase. This means, as already underlined, that the so-called ‘presentification’
of young people’s lives does not equate with depoliticization (Alteri, Leccardi,
and Raffini 2016).

Barbara Giovanna Bello: We would like to reflect on the gender dimension.

Looking at disaggregated data on gender, young women and girls have different
starting points from those of their mothers and grandmothers: the levels of edu-
cation are higher; more and more young women live alone and are independent;
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES   17

many of them are breadwinners; and motherhood is postponed and not neces-
sarily considered an experience a woman must go through. Despite that, women
are paid less and struggle to reconcile family and work life.

Carmen Leccardi: Today young women are very active. It is they who seem to be
the most interested in participating, for instance, in cultural life and even on an
institutional level. An old friend of mine, Ferruccio Capelli, who is the director of
Casa della Cultura (House of Culture), a long-established and prestigious cultural
institution in Milan, told me for example that the majority of active participants in its
various initiatives – online and offline - are women. Among them, younger women
are especially active. In their turn, third- and fourth-wave feminism have helped
this activism. They underline that micro-politics and the everyday are the arenas in
which subjectivities can express themselves outside any mainstream direction. On
a general level, it must be stated that inequalities among women and men are only
partly decreasing in the country; think about the old problem (not only a national
one) of the gender pay gap. Violence against women is also not decreasing, and
in Italy this problem is on everyone’s lips today. Young women try to build over
these limits and confirm their clear determination to be key players in social life.
In particular, I would stress the importance of intergenerational bonds among
women. Although, as we all know, there are severe discontinuities in the lives
of women, especially after World War II, young women actively view the past
through the experiences of their mothers and grandmothers. They construct
forms of social and cultural continuity, and we could say that they go precisely
in the opposite direction of neoliberal policies. This means that the ‘presentifi-
cation’ trend we have been previously discussing finds in their case a powerful
antidote in intergenerational memory, in particular in family memory. In the
first half of the past century, Maurice Halbwachs (1992) clarified very well the
important role played by collective memory and, in it, by family memory, in
protecting and empowering social bonds. Through this memory, young women
can confront their mothers’ and grandmothers’ biographical times with their
own. Despite the huge number of social factors enhancing uncertainty, this
comparison allows them to reflect upon their potential for self-fulfilment, larger
than that of their mothers and much larger than that of their grandmothers.
The chance to fully express themselves both in the public sphere of life, thanks
to education, and in the private one, for instance choosing or avoiding moth-
erhood, gives them a special awareness of intergenerational social changes in
comparison with their male peers. They are aware that social life is plural also in
relation to the times of life, as I already mentioned. These times – that of work,
of love, of friendship – are not represented in a hierarchical system. Rather, they
are considered as different points in a web, each with its own priorities, language
and symbolic system. This means that, according to their experiences, we do not
need a pyramid to give a representation of social time; in fact, there is no clear
ranking among the different times of life. This ranking is a variable: it depends
18   C. LECCARDI ET AL.

basically on the different social ages and the different existential positions of
the subjects who live them.

Barbara Giovanna Bello: In an intergenerational perspective, even if young

women haven’t succeeded in breaking the glass ceiling at work, they have
gained more awareness of their key role in society.

Carmen Leccardi: As the research carried out in the 1980s already showed
(Leccardi 1996), young women seem especially aware of the changes in life
according, for example, to the presence or absence of others’ times in one’s life;
the time of a partner or the time of children can redefine one’s temporality. And,
being aware of the lives of their older sisters, they know very well, for instance,
that the age of the child can deeply influence the organization of the everyday.
Basically, they seem to know that to avoid an unsatisfactory relation with social
time (we could say, with institutional times), they must find a personal balance
between the different times of life. This special awareness, it must be stressed,
makes their coping with current, often difficult, youth experiences less burden-
some than for young men. In my opinion, this is perhaps the main reason why
it is said that (young) women are one step ahead of (young) men.
On a more general level, we can say that young women’s competence in
constructing forms of temporal continuities, as mentioned before when we
discussed women’s genealogies, enables them to be active creators of durée,
of duration, of islands of ‘longer time’ in a landscape shaped by simultaneity as
characteristic of financial capitalism. All in all, we can look at young women as
builders of a sort of alternative temporality. First, they seem to be able to recon-
struct meaningful links between past, present and future, coping, through these
relations, with the fragmentation of time that results from the unstoppable (and
even increasing) speed of the time of the market. Second, they seem to possess
a plural vision of the times of life, able to gently cope with the disruptions of
temporal experiences characteristic of high-speed societies. These characteris-
tics of their temporal experience allow them to exercise, broadly speaking and
in principle, satisfactory forms of control over their biographical time. It seems
to me that today one of the most difficult problems in their biographies, one
they have trouble trying to cope with, is to decide if – and in particular when
– to give birth. The postponement of motherhood until after one’s thirties, a
European as well as national trend, is in fact only a temporary solution of the
acknowledged plurality of the times of life.

Barbara Giovanna Bello: As we said already, young women have more free-
dom, more awareness than did previous generations, and both young men and
women are more educated. Despite this activation of women (or maybe just
because of it), violence against women seems to be on the rise in Italy, inde-
pendently of the victims’ and perpetrators’ class, education or social position.
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES   19

As a response to violence against women, a number of universities as well as

various women’s associations have promoted initiatives to raise awareness of
this topic. How can we explain the persistence among young people of male
violence against women in today’s Italy?
Carmen Leccardi: I think your point is especially important because it allows
us to consider the specificities of young women’s experiences in Italy. In fact,
they have to cope not only with the well-known problems of the future; they
must also cope with changes in young men’s identities, which are slower than
the changes in their own identities. That difference in speed of identity transfor-
mation in young women and young men creates a new set of problems. Young
men, and men in general, seem to be in trouble with the new levels of social and
existential autonomy young women express, not so much along their profes-
sional paths, but especially in their claim for self-determination and autonomy
in private and intimate life. The widespread presence of violence against women
in social life – its peak is expressed by femicide, enacted especially by those men
who do not accept their partner’s decision to break up with them – is a powerful
indicator of this process.
A different level of gender-based violence has to do with forms of discrim-
ination in the labour market that women still have to suffer in Italy. For sure,
stereotypes related to women’s roles do not help in constructing types of work
relations based on the real level of knowledge and competence young women
today express. These stereotypes continue to be strong, but for different reasons
if compared to the 1950s and 1960s. During those years, the presence of women
in the public sphere was weak, and social life was strongly male-dominated.
Currently, the sexist stereotypes against women are an indicator, in principle,
of their new social strength in the public sphere, very much related to their
high level of education, higher than that of young men. And, of course, it is
also an indicator of their self-awareness, the awareness of oneself as an active
and autonomous subject, one of the positive results of the strong second-wave
feminism of the 1970s that subverted male dominance in many areas of social
life. That wave also produced a series of new rights that women could enjoy
in relation to family life, but also, for instance, in relation to their control over
pregnancy.
To sum up, these stereotypes seem to be an expression of what Ernst Bloch
in the 1930s called the ‘non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous’ (see
Bloch 2009). This concept indicates that we can find, in the same historical time,
groups of people who, even though they share contemporaneity from a cultural
point of view, seem to belong to different epochs. This is the case, here, of those
who use some old-style stereotypes against women in the second decade of
the twenty-first century.
Against these stereotypes and the damaging effects that they have on social
life, many young women use innovative forms of thought and action. I do believe
20   C. LECCARDI ET AL.

that innovation must be understood as the ways through which new meanings
are constructed, not only the sort of problem-solving innovation strictly related
to technological innovation. Innovation as a problem-solving medium is the new
mantra of neoliberal regimes. However, innovation as a way of producing new
meanings is strictly connected with practices of social and cultural participation.
Through these practices, young women de-structure stereotypes, produce new
meanings and identities, and express their subjectivities.

Valentina Cuzzocrea: And can you comment on these types of mainstream

interpretations of young people in Italy as bamboccioni, or ‘big stuffed babies’?

Carmen Leccardi: These stereotypes are widespread in our time. As I said before,
many young people still live with their parents in their thirties, although more
young men than young women. They feel themselves individually autonomous and
ask for social recognition. However, from an economic and social point of view, they
are still dependent on their families. The lack of specific welfare policies enhancing
their social autonomy is at the basis of this striking contradiction. It is also a reason
for the strong dissatisfaction towards adult institutions young Italian people show.

Valentina Cuzzocrea: Yes, maybe we could go back to this idea of resilience that
you have mentioned as an important one, and to the perspective of studying
young people through the temporal horizon. There are very interesting ways
of playing around temporalities that we’ve also seen in ‘the IFuture research
project, on Sardinian youth’. Thinking of the mobility issue, because that is also
a matter of reflecting on temporality, in Italy many people leave the country,
and we have many young people who move from the South to the North, and
they never come back. So, in terms of resistance, in terms of agency, how would
you conceptualize this?

Carmen Leccardi: You are right, many young people decide to leave the country
in these years. And not by chance. Especially in the years of the great reces-
sion, young people’s migration increased significantly. According to Fondazione
Migrantes (2016), an Italian Catholic Foundation, in the ten years between 2005
and 2015 the percentage increase of (mostly well-educated) young Italians
leaving the country due to the lack of employment choices was equal to 49%.
The preferred European destinations are Germany, Switzerland and France and,
before Brexit, the UK. They decide not to give up, and leave. This can also be
considered an active form of resistance.
On a conceptual level, I consider subjectivity a sort of ‘resistance’ to social
constraints (see, on the topic, Martuccelli 2002), as a way of affirming one’s
desire of being ‘beyond social roles’, as Simmel underlined in his second a priori.
When, for example, you mention 18-year-old girls who dream about having
more than two children in their twenties, and then starting a career and so on,
you refer to a relation between subjectivities and identities. Identities cannot
 JOURNAL OF MODERN ITALIAN STUDIES   21

be conceived outside social and cultural profiles, and subjectivities are exactly
that: ‘being outside’. The expression of subjectivity is usually especially strong
during adolescence, as in the case of your interviewees. Nevertheless, the dia-
lectic between the two, subjectivity and identity, marks the biographical time
of all human beings, but especially of young people during their social travel
towards the future. Subjectivities are to be considered, ultimately, as a way
through which people look at their own lives, not only coping with social oppor-
tunities and constraints, as happens when identities are involved, but giving free
space to one’s own desires, to one’s own dreams, as in your research. Of course,
subjectivities are also shaped by societies; this is evident for us. Nevertheless,
while the project of future identities must face a good number of problems in
our time – because it requires a precise relation between biographical time and
social time – subjectivities are fed especially by those possibilities that cannot
be chosen.

Valentina Cuzzocrea: Thanks for opening so many insights, which put the study
of youth in Italy into perspective.

Barbara Giovanna Bello: Can we just conclude this interview by asking you,
what would your final thoughts on contemporary youths be?

Carmen Leccardi: Being young today means being in a position to confront

uninterrupted social change… young people are travelling and do not stop
travelling; young people are constructing and destroying and reconstructing.
New possibilities open up; others quickly close. In that sense, I think that young
people’s resilience is also a way of constructing new forms of exploration of the
social world, new ways of coping with a future that is rich in fear; the disequilib-
rium of our planet not only from a social but also from a climatic point of view is
well known, and global warming is a tragic reality of our epoch. Not only global
movements but also many individual young people try to face these problems
starting from their everyday life. Action and relations in the everyday can make
a difference. This is a change of perspective in social and political participation
as well as in social research, one of the reasons why ‘individualized collective
action’ can become a real challenge. It is also an important suggestion about
the new link, in a globalized world, between local and global. In that sense, I
would suggest that, instead of the Ni-Ni generation (the ‘Ninis’), as the NEET
generation was called in Spain, we should try to call it the Yes-Yes generation;
yes to social recognition, yes to self-fulfilment, yes to control over one’s time
of life. This change in our perspectives on youth is aimed at recognizing their
cognitive, cultural and political potentialities and can have an impact, in my
opinion, on youth’s general social representation. As sociologists, we are well
aware that if we define a certain reality in a certain manner, this definition will
produce concrete consequences. To sum up, we should be able to completely
22   C. LECCARDI ET AL.

reshape the ways in which we understand what being young means. From this
new point of view, youth can be considered, instead of a specific stage of life,
a metaphor – a metaphor dealing with social change in a time of uncertainty.

Notes
1. 
The research was funded by the CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche-National
Research Council) and was supported by IARD, a private research institute and
a reference point for several decades of national youth surveys. In 2007, IARD
ended its activities. Ten years later, in 2017, they were started anew thanks to a
network of Italian universities.
2. 
For the results of this second piece of research, see Leccardi (1996); Calabrò (1996);
Rampazi (1991); and Tabboni (1992).
3. 
The list of Research Networks is available at: http://www.europeansociology.org/
research-networks/ (accessed 6 March 2017).
4. 
See the webpage at: http://www.ais-sociologia.it/ (accessed 6 March 2017).
5. 
https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/185497.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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