This paper presents the theoretical and methodological framework of an on-going research, focusing on social boundaries in educational contexts. The research aims to explore such contexts “from the margins”, through the perspective of border studies (Wilson and Donnan 2012). We argue that this theoretical framework, originated within migration studies, can be fruitful for the analysis of educational worlds (Navone and Tersigni 2020). Combined with the methodological practice of the “forum theatre” (Boal 2000), it can highlight processes of inequality reproduction and catalyse emancipatory dynamics, opening up decolonial perspectives in education.

Social boundaries are understood as “selective filters” that generate processes of “differential inclusion” (Mezzadra and Nielson 2013) and that are not located at the fringe, but within political spaces (Balibar 2001). To analyse “boundary work” (Barth 1996), a useful analytical concept is that of “boundary event” (Twine 1996). This represents an encounter in which subjects become aware, through the behaviour of others, that they are perceived as different, and can reproduce or challenge this attribution of otherness. Such encounters can become the occasion for collective learning, by being dramatized through forum theatre, one of the main techniques of the theatre of the oppressed. Forum theatre aims to facilitate the exploration of possible tactics of liberation from oppression: after some actors perform an episode that exemplifies a social conflict, people from the audience are invited on stage to perform their suggestion to unravel the issue. Through forum theatre, boundary events can then be put in dialogue with the different subjects involved in educational worlds, and trigger generative dynamics of boundary renegotiation.

The paper suggests that educational contexts can be observed - and transformed - by focusing on both the dynamics of difference construction, around intersectional dimensions such as class, race, and gender (Crenshaw 1989), and the everyday tactics of boundary negotiation enacted by subjects. We will concentrate specifically on “first-generation students” (Romito 2022), the first family members to attend university, who often experience multiple differentiations (eg.around the axes of class, migrant origin, family educational resources). The selective filters activated through boundaries can structure forms of exclusion, testifying that boundaries are constitutive elements of social and political spaces (Anderlini, Filippi, Giliberti 2022), but can also open up opportunities for tactics of resistance and negotiation, enacted by the subjects inhabiting educational worlds.

In modern, globalized societies, marked by transnational migrations (Castles, 2002) and "superdiversity" (Vertovec, 2007), multiculturalist, assimilationist and differential exclusion policies contribute to strengthening inequalities between and within nations, proposing a hierarchical categorization of knowledge and a declassification of experiences and epistemologies that do not respond to the dominant Western model (Mignolo, 2000).

Colonial relations of domination guide teaching contents and practices in university classrooms and schools (hooks, 1994; Walsh, 2009; Borghi, 2020). The “coloniality of minds” (Ngũgĩ, 1986) and the “coloniality of knowledge” (Lugones, 2008, 2011) in relation to the “coloniality of being” and power (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2013), cause the cultural appropriation or concealment of a given culture for the imposition of "universal knowledge", in this case Western knowledge, which subjugates and removes what comes from fields of knowledge, philosophies and thoughts of the Global South (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). This contributes to strengthening the deficient and homogenizing narrative of subjects coming from migratory contexts and to flattening discourses and practices, with and about the migrant, on the binary thinking typical of the colonial mentality. The delegitimization of peripheral knowledge is promoted through the deprivation of the possibility of active participation by subjects in situations of social marginality in schools and university classrooms, as well as through the lack of presentation of other representations of history and modernity, of experiences of social empowerment in territories of origin and in those of reception, of other views of development and inequality that could facilitate social responsibility and global solidarity.

Starting from a series of creative workshops and experience gained in the context of the relationship with students of the Intercultural Pedagogy in Primary Education Sciences degree course, the contribution proposes practices and methodologies of conscientization and dialogue (Freire, 1970), of co-reflection and horizontal production of knowledge to stimulate alternative, anti-racist and intercultural teaching (Jewell, 2020) and imagine a future decolonial school together with the teachers who will animate it.

The phenomenon of homeschooling in Italy has seen a significant increase in the last decade (MIM- Anagrafe Nazionale degli Studenti). Some primary motivations for this increase noted in the literature are the introduction of obligatory vaccines in 2017 and, more recently, the strict Covid-19 protocols taken in schools (Chinazzi 2020). The visible increase of homeschooling over the last few years has incited an emergent and new field of inquiry for Italian sociologists and pedagogists (Chinazzi 2020, 2023; Di Motoli 2020; Leonora 2019).

Our research, which is still being elaborated empirically, is intended to uncover whether and in what terms homeschooling can be considered a legitimate counter-hegemonic practice (Leonora 2019). Even though it can be viewed as a renunciation, subtraction, and self-exclusion, homeschooling can also be seen to problematize the dominant educational paradigm by deconstructing and alienating the spatial, temporal, and didactical processes of education. It can also be seen to disrupt hierarchical and specialized knowledge construction model, both on the didactic and disciplinary level. In order to investigate this counter-hegemonic thesis, we consider and evaluate the various motivations and practices that are integral to such an impactful decision. In this paper, we follow two prominent motivational tracks that are both born out of liberal individualist positions, but are razionalized by families for very different ends. In the first, we investigate the figure of the “professional nomad student,” who, thanks to significant family resources, homeschools as a budding participant in the globalized and hyper individualized free market (a model which also resembles the intensive parenting model). We investigate how this homeschooling paradigm aligns with the larger neoliberal paradigm of competition, performance, and excessive privatization (De Oliveira, Barbosa 2017; Snyder 2013). Secondly, we investigate homeschooling from the ideological perspective of “protest liberatarianism.” In this case, parents do not remove their children to make them more competitive in the marketplace persay, but because of a principled position against state intervention. Here the justification tends to have a logic of individual creativity and expression, often within a detached and likeminded community (Di Motoli 2020). Here the individual freedom is in line with classical theories of Millian liberalism. In our detailed view of both homeschooling paradigms, we critically analyze these narratives based on their merits as counter-hegemonic practices. In doing so, we seek to determine whether these positions might be considered legitimate or illegitimate as counter measures of freedom when analyzed through comparative, and equally democratically important, principles of social freedom and non-dominational freedom.

Decolonising education involves a moltitude of strategies to transform society rethinking European modernity and the legacy of colonialism and empire (Bhambra et al. 2018, 2-3). With our paper we want to offer our contribution to discuss how it is possible to challenge Eurocentric forms of knowledge and counter racial inequalities starting from primary and secondary schools.

In our sociological research we were inspired by Bhambra and Homwood (2021), resituating the role of European/Italian colonialism in shaping contemporary society and its inequalities, and countering the systematic denial or downplaying of racism outside and inside schools. If colonialism as a historical phenomenon can indeed be considered finished, colonialidad as a condition that structures the present is not (Climaco 2023). Coloniality is one of the constitutive elements of the global capitalist system and is based on the imposition of racial classifications of the world's population as the cornerstone of the reproduction of power, which operates on a material and symbolic level.

We explored the issue of racism in primary and secondary schools in the Veneto region, trying to re-connect research and action (Frisina, Farina, Surian 2021; 2023). We were interested in using methods which can give life to emancipatory knowledge and practices. In our study, we have considered children as active social actors (Corsaro 2018) who do not simply reproduce racial hierarchy but they also challenge it, by using their peer cultures. Moreover, in the action side of our research we collaborated with teachers interested in contrasting the inequalities in society by challenging the neoliberal education (Laval, Clement and Dreux 2011), with its color-blind ideology and its myth of meritocracy.

In our presentation we will discuss how we used the subjective production of texts and drawings by students to study the construction of otherness (Tabet 1997) and to reflect further on the cultural legacy of Italian colonialism; moreover, we will show how focus groups among students were useful to explore racialization at work and to make it visible in the daily lives of children and young people, in and out of school. We will discuss how we have tried to include in our study a reflection on our positionings and how we have tried to bring out from the discussion an awareness of whiteness, privilege and responsibility. Finally, drawing on Philomena Essed’s (2020) essay on the processes of de-humanisation, humiliation and the search for dignity, we will argue how antiracist action-research have the potential to open space for building possible symbolic bridges across different systems of domination and to weave intersectional alliances, facilitating mutual recognition among students.