Time boundaries of identity

While identity is a continuous process of definition, redifinition, identification and differentiation in a story of ourselves that keeps on changing according to circumstances and experiences, it is also true that, due to the same reasons, identity may be defined as the ability to acknowledge your own entirety and continuity in time. This means emphasising the ways with which the individual 'crosses' time 8that is, it relates and represents in itselfyour own history and everyday and your future project) and the strategies to use in order to give meaning and consistency to this path, be it continuous or discontinuous, Of course individuals, when definiig their own biographies, articulated by everyday rhythms, must both refer to and take into account time frames that are not only subjective, but also social end collective.They must therefore adapt their own time frames to those of the other individuals with whom they interact, and to those of the social institutions whin which they have dealings. The author shows how, for asylum seekers and refugees, this relationship seems problematic and fragmentary: because they come from cultural and social contexts where the social organisation of time does not necessarily coincide with that of advanced industrialised societies; because their forced migration 'forcibly' distrupted their everyday life and plans; because, lastly, the Italian receptions system collocated them for a significant length of time in a sort of limbo where the time frame and modalities of of release were not at all clear, and it is difficult to reconnect the threads that make the present the place where the past experience becomes a future project,