Conference Program

Gender-based violence is rooted not only in social structures but also in symbolic imaginaries formed from early childhood. Biography for young readers, as a genre structured around role modelling and exemplarity, plays a decisive role in shaping gendered representations of agency and professional legitimacy. The BIBI Programme (Biografie e Biofiction d’Infanzia) responds to this challenge by developing a national model based on co-research networks and cultural prevention.

The programme is a biennial national research and educational initiative funded by the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers – Department for Equal Opportunities through a competitive public call for research and intervention projects aimed at preventing violence against women and promoting effective institutional networking practices. It brings together universities, local authorities, schools, socio-educational services, and specialised publishers across Italy within a structured, multi-level collaborative framework grounded in participatory research.

The project is situated within contemporary scholarship that conceptualises biography for young readers as a complex and historically regulated genre shaped by tensions between documentation, narrative construction, visual mediation, and reader positioning (Beauvais, 2020; Douglas, 2022). Historically structured around dynamics of exemplarity and normativity (Eaton, 2006), biography functions as a powerful device of symbolic modelling, contributing to the construction of gender imaginaries and professional role representations. Recent research has demonstrated how contemporary biographies, particularly those dedicated to women, oscillate between empowerment narratives and new forms of responsibilisation, while also reproducing subtle normative expectations, meritocratic individualism, and depoliticised accounts of structural inequality, thereby revealing the complex ideological implications embedded in gendered constructions of authority, agency, and professional recognition (Couceiro, 2022; Campagnaro, 2025; Filograsso, 2025; Malpezzi, 2024).

Within this framework, BIBI adopts illustrated biography as a transformative pedagogical device aimed at reshaping children’s gender imaginaries between the ages of 3 and 14. Through corpus-based iconotextual analysis, participatory reading practices, teacher training, and structured classroom experimentation, the programme works on the pluralisation of professional aspirations and the deconstruction of stereotypical associations between gender and social roles. In dialogue with approaches that interpret biography as an interplay between modelling, iconicity, and symbolic construction (Malpezzi, 2025), BIBI promotes narrative forms that include vulnerability, conflict, error, and identity negotiation, thereby moving beyond purely heroic and idealised representations (Jurich, 1972).

A distinctive feature of the programme is its co-research architecture. The network functions as an epistemic infrastructure in which researchers, educators, and institutional partners collaboratively design, implement, and evaluate educational interventions. This model enables comparative experimentation across territories, systematic pre- and post-intervention data collection, and the integration of literary analysis, empirical research, and policy-oriented dissemination (Campagnaro & Ferrari, 2025).

The paper will outline the programme’s theoretical foundations, describe the structure of its participatory research network, discuss the iconotextual and pedagogical criteria guiding corpus selection and classroom implementation, and present preliminary findings emerging from experimental phases. It will argue that biography-based symbolic modelling can operate as a structural mechanism of primary prevention by intervening on the cultural roots of gender inequality and expanding the horizon of professional roles perceived as socially legitimate and attainable.