Communication, political socialisation and participation through digital media during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond: the case of second-generation Tamil youth

Reflexive political socialisation (Bettin Lattes, 2006) also passes through digital media. This contribution aims to analyse intergenerational political socialisation as a bidirectional and transactional process (Percheron, 1974; Macaluso and Tumminelli, 2017) within the Tamil community in Palermo. The Sri Lankan community is among the largest non-EU foreign communities in Italy (102,906), and the Italian diasporic community is the largest Sri Lankan community in Europe, followed by the French and Swiss communities (Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali 2022), within this the Tamil minority is one of the biggest in Italy. For a broader study, twenty in-depth interviews were conducted with second-generation Tamil youth (Macaluso and Tumminelli, 2023). Digital media play a significant role in keeping diasporic communities connected in different countries around the world, in maintaining ties with Sri Lanka, and in disseminating information and norms of the country in which they live with an interesting intervention of the younger generation. Many members of the first generation do not understand technical Italian so during the Pandemic Tamil second generation created the website Tamil Info Point for translating and explaining antiCovid-19 measures and cross-checking news for their parents.