Written Emotional Disclosure and Boundary Making. Minority Children Writing About Discrimination

Abstract

The present paper explores how “written emotional disclosure”, in particular writing about personal feelings and thoughts concerning discriminatory events, can represent an important opportunity for children to engage in the transformation of categorical boundaries through complex cognitive and emotional processes. In particular, the paper explores from a comparative perspective: 1) how minority and migrant children express their opinions about personal and vicarious experiences of discrimination in different cultural and social contexts; 2) how, through these writings, children develop some cognitive and emotional coping strategies to handle external categorization. At the educational level, children’s expressive writings can represent relevant material for educators in order to understand meanings that pupils bring with them into their classroom, as well as educational tools for children in multicultural contexts. I draw on some extracts from open-ended essays written by minority and migrant children aged 9-10 attending elementary schools in Japan and in Italy.

Keywords:

• minority children
• discrimination
• boundaries
• social identity
• emotions

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Flavia Cangià

Flavia Cangià is Post Doc research fellow at the Institute of Psychology and Education of the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) within the National Center of Competence in Research–The Migration-Mobility Nexus.

Between June and September 2014, she worked as a research assistant at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) conducting research on the relationship between emotions and ethnic boundaries. Between 2012-2013, she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, where she carried out research within the Project “Migration” of the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Cultural Heritage of the National Research Council in Italy. Her research interests include minority issues, migration, ethnicity and social identity, racism and discrimination, emotions, children and youths in inter-cultural relations.