Abstract

This article explores the school experience of young women of Islamic culture in Italy. How does the school contribute to these young women's reflexivity on their social experience? How does it influence their capacity for public action and civic engagement? Results show that the school experience, more than the institution, contributes in two important ways. First, it encourages cognitive and critical reflexivity. Conceptual reflexivity learned at school is non-cumulative and non-predictive but is continually changing. Second, the school experience stimulates aesthetic and hermeneutic criticism of this conceptual reflexivity. The interviewees contrast monolithic western modernity with a lifestyle steeped in religiosity. Wearing the veil, dressing in a chaste manner or punctuating the day with prayer emerge as "technology of the self", not in opposition to science and technology, but together with spirituality, tradition and their culture. They ask that this combination of the two kinds reflexivity become an issue in the contemporary public space.