“Come a casa mia”: pratiche alimentari, intersezioni identitarie e attraversamenti urbani nell’esperienza dell’immigrazione

This contribution highlights how food-related cultural constructions and representations can become central elements in the experiences that migrant women and men make in the context of their daily life as a place to “feel at home” or, on the contrary, as space of exacerbation of the experience of exile. This is the result of a wider research, conducted with qualitative and ethnographic methods in the Northern neighbourhood of the City of Padua and deepen the ways in which such representations and constructions can acquire different meanings on the basis of social, biographical, family, migratory, generational and gender placements of the social actors. Food and food-related narratives, in fact, can be constituted as a embedded identity practice or element of generational conflict, space of comfort or terrain of a clash, form of symbolic resistance or symbol of social downward mobility and degradation