This article aims to explore how children of immigrants enrolled in higher secondary schools in Milan conceive and speak about citizenship. It illustrates how the formal, participatory and identity dimensions of citizenship come to be articulated in a complex and changeable way in relation to discourses and contexts. In particular, it attempts to look more closely at the transformations of belonging, which today seems to be composed of different layers that underline different aspects: admittance stresses the universalistic claim to be equal, to not be excluded on the basis of discrimination or prejudice; identification conserves a particularistic and essentialist meaning, it stresses the importance and the 'unavoidableness' of difference; involvement regards lifestyles, everyday relations, it confers importance on the possibility to participate on behalf of a specific interest and have a stake in a community's life and future. Therefore, citizenship assumes different meanings when discourses shift from one layer to another.

Given the growing transitional character of food, on its way from farm to fork, a rising number of people and institutions affect what we eat, governing how food is produced, consumed and distributed day-to-day. The sociological response to these transformations lead to a conceptualization of food as a dynamic field, crucial to the understanding of how we negotiate production and consumption as specific and meaningful sets of activities. In this article, I suggest applying the recent conceptualization of practice theory in order to understand the increasing complexity of food issues. I start by illustrating some basic sociological works on consumption of food quality, then I present the main outcome of a qualitative research study about the commercial cooking in a Northern Italian city. The issue of food quality and the effects of its social construction on consumers habits are eventually discussed.

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While the role of material culture in reproducing everyday routines and representations has been widely studied, only specific social groupsmostly US or Europe based -have been studied qua 'consumers'. This article draws on the heuristic potential of materiality for the analysis of consumption practices, and on Bourdieu's theory of practice and notions of habitus and hysteresis, in order to explore what happens when immigrants bring their earlier dispositions to new social and material settings. In accordance with the Bourdieusian notion of hysteresis, the article investigates the extent of creative adaptations made possible by the lagging of habitus. Findings from a two-year research project are presented, focusing on both verbal and visual representations of taste of a sample of boys and girls of different national origins recently arrived in Italy. Furthermore the article discusses the potential of the photoelicitation technique for analyzing social consumption practices and its overall contribution to the study of the wider relationship between consumption practices and ethnic identification. this paper to the study of the wider relationship between consumption practices and ethnic identification. Consumption practices, material culture and ethnic identityThe main theoretical framework with the explicit aim of investigating the relationship between consumption and migration is the so-called 'consumer acculturation theory'. This approach tries to keep together attention to low income -typical of segmented assimilation theory 1 -with a focus on transnationalism and the multidimensional trajectories of identification in migration (O'Guinn et al., 1986;Beck and Sznaider 2006, Hofmeister and Breitenstein 2008). This stream of literature started in the 1980s by exploring the complexities of migrants' adaptation to Western consumer cultures. The field of 'consumer acculturation research' has since then been established by assessing the levels of assimilation through differences in consumption choices particularly vis-à-vis American mainstream consumers. Recently there have been significant adjustments and reviews of that theory, paying more attention to intra-ethnic differentiations (Ogden et al 2004; Wakiuru et al 2007) and power relations (Üstüner and Holt 2007; Askegaard et al. the practice turn in consumption studies has drawn on the idea that consumption is mostly a mundane process of appropriation and appreciation of goods and services, and not merely acquisition through market exchange and communicative display. Moreover, early works in this