Emotions and symbolic boundaries. Reflections on youths' views about migration in Italy

Emotions can play a significant role in the way individuals learn about, adopt or reject the conceptual distinctions that categorize people and groups along different lines of belonging. In particular, in the experience of personal and others' migration, individuals can be confronted with a variety of emotions, and can refer to various emotion categories in order to make sense of the possible differences and similarities between themselves and others. This paper discusses the relationship between emotions and boundaries by drawing on a combination of cognitive perspectives and the boundary-making approach. It analyses some essays of adolescents in a state high school in Italy concerning their attitudes towards migration, and investigates how these youths understand and transform socio-ethnic categories through emotions.