Ideologia Mutata: Turning Points and Affective Mechanisms of Ideological Change in Migrant Intercultural Experience

Drawing on life-story interviews collected in two waves, this study examines how forced migrants in Italy narrate ideological change through emotionally significant encounters that alter judgments about dignity, belonging, and freedom. Narrative analysis distinguishes corrective, disillusioning, and liberating turning points, tracing how shame and disgust, anger and indignation, and pride, gratitude, and relief become relevant to the reconsideration of ideological commitments. Across the illustrative cases, experiences of exclusion, recognition, and care acquire biographical significance as narrators interpret their changing circumstances through shared expectations about moral worth, fairness, and acceptable ways of living. The typology clarifies how these interpretations sustain familiar frameworks, weaken confidence in their promises, or make alternative commitments desirable, situating ideological change within the cultural meanings and relationships through which personal experience is understood. Turning points thus provide an analytical lens for examining how emotional experience enters the narrative explanation and justification of continuity and change in belief.