When diversity becomes a resource: Managing alterity and everyday cosmopolitanisms in Carlo Pisacane, a primary school in Rome

Abstract

The paper addresses the ways in which the negative social connotation associated with a majority of foreigners in an Italian primary school (Carlo Pisacane, Rome) was first ‘ethnicized’ in numerical terms, and subsequently politically transformed into an issue of national identity. The purpose of this paper is then to show Pisacane’s attempts to transform itself from a school of immigrants into a cosmopolitan space and, to some extent, how it is unintentionally transforming itself into a cosmopolitan enclave. The proposal is therefore to rethink to Pisacane as a cosmopolitan enclave within which different forms of everyday cosmopolitanisms have the opportunity to grow and develop, together with some paradoxes and unintentional practices of exclusion. In the attempt to eradicate the opposition between being cosmopolitan and being parochial, the suggestion is to rethink to cosmopolitanism no longer as a typical phenomenon of Western “rootless” elites but rather as situated.