Martina Crescenti
This research project investigates the practices of intergenerational care and solidarity at the transnational level between second-generation Italian Muslim youth and Muslim grandparents living in their countries of origin. In transnational families, relationships between grandparents and grandchildren are maintained at a distance through spaces of virtual co-presence and sometimes in presence during holiday stays and festivities. Transnational relationships produce new practices of care and solidarity between grandparents and grandchildren, but also between parents (grandparents) and migrant children. Forms of solidarity can be multiple, from affective, associative, consensual, functional to normative and structural. Religion presents a strong normative and legal apparatus that can construct specific forms of solidarity within transnational family relationships.
Starting from this theoretical framework, a research study was undertaken (first phase carried out 2020-2021; revised 2024) analysing intergenerational solidarity practices between grandparents and grandchildren to understand the ways in which family relationships are reconstructed and maintained following the migration process. To date, 28 individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with young Italian Muslims of various cultural backgrounds and analysed with the support of the Nvivo software. The first results show a relationship based mainly on affective solidarity and functional solidarity, provided by the parents through economic funding. On the religious consensual level, there is a deep divide: reinterpreting Islam following the migration process, the grandchildren do not share the popular Islamic corpus adhered to by their grandparents. Central, finally, are health-related practices: long-distance family care largely supports and replaces public care in the countries of origin, which, according to the interviewees, is disorganised, lacking and expensive.