Conference Program

This paper examines shared reading of illustrated picturebooks as a form of women’s cultural and relational work that facilitates emancipatory pathways in migrant contexts

Traditionally considered tools for children’s education, picturebooks are increasingly recognized in contemporary pedagogy as powerful mediators of meaning for adult learners, especially where linguistic barriers, social marginalization, and gendered power asymmetries intersect.

The study is based on community workshops with migrant women and local volunteers in Tor Pignattara (Rome), a multicultural neighborhood with long-term migrant settlement and conditions of “incomplete integration.” Despite stable residence, many women face linguistic dependency, limited access to public participation, and subtle forms of invisibilization.

This study adopts a qualitative, ethnographic approach to explore the potential of shared reading of illustrated picturebooks as a pedagogical tool for promoting intercultural inclusion and temporarily suspending social asymmetries in adult marginalization contexts. Data collection includes participant observation, reflective journaling, semi-structured interviews, and analysis of narrative materials produced during the workshops. Thematic analysis followed an inductive approach, emphasizing triangulation of sources to deepen the understanding of relational processes and symbolic agency among migrant women participants.

Through collective reading and dialogic interpretation, participants engaged in processes of self-reconstruction. The metaphorical power of illustrated picturebooks created a “third space” where women could gather on equal terms, reimagining and reshaping their experiences. Using images, metaphors, and fictional characters, participants expressed experiences of migration, care work, exclusion, and resilience, without being confined to deficit-based or testimonial frameworks. Narrative practice thus functioned as a form of symbolic agency, enabling participants to re-signify lived experience and renegotiate their self-representations.

Empowerment is understood as relational and situated, emerging through shared narrative work. The workshops served as capacitating services, expanding expressive, relational, and participatory capabilities often constrained in migrant women’s everyday lives.

By foregrounding narrative reconstruction as women’s cultural work, this paper contributes to debates on democratic citizenship, intersectionality, and emancipatory pathways. It argues that illustrated picturebooks, embedded in dialogic and horizontally structured spaces, generate micro-democratic environments of recognition and belonging, empowering migrant women to exercise symbolic agency and participate more fully in social life.