The Cultural Integration of Young Refugees: an Experience Within the Italian Academic Context

Cultural and academic integration of migrants and refugees is a structural social need of Mediterranean Europe. Despite often being managed and experienced as emergencies, they call for effective tools capable of creating new opportunities both for newly arrived and the hosting communities. The paper sets out to highlight how the results of sociological research, in an interdisciplinary approach, may constitute useful tools for the clarification of previous studies undertaken on refugees and students, to the point of creating outcomes that may be considered genuine practices of social and cultural inclusion (Dryden-Peterson, S. 2011), necessary for reprogramming European inclusion policies and for turning around the perspective of migration from a problem to an opportunity for new human capital, avoiding the waste and erosion of ‘migratory resources’.