In Duobus Locis: spatialized moral regulation and the resizing of claimable futures among young migrant men in Italy

This article examines how ordinary urban places shape which futures marginalized young men can plausibly claim. It draws on interviews and ethnographic observations with 28 men aged 18–22 in five Italian cities and develops a comparative analysis of two migrant participants in a barber shop and a bar. The study asks how place-specific audiences, visibility regimes, and relations of dependence affect the legitimacy of future-oriented claims. The analysis identifies three distinct processes: the moral filtering of presence, the spatial calibration of claimability, and the spatial condensation of futurity. In the barber shop, occupational aspiration becomes tied to unpaid usefulness and peripheral belonging. In the bar, employability is protected through controlled visibility and reputational caution. The cases show how material precarity combines with a moral topography that authorizes, narrows, protects, or exposes future claims differently across places. The article shifts attention from unequal opportunities to unequal claimability and conceptualizes deontic foreclosure as a spatially distributed process.