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Developed within the SCOPERTA research programme at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania, this work aligns with the Department’s civic and public engagement agenda by orienting research tools and outputs towards strengthening the local educational community. Through field-based activities involving students, doctoral researchers, and grant holders, the programme combines situated learning with a community-facing service: collaborating with schools and third-sector organisations to co-produce usable knowledge and mapping tools that support coordination, orientation, and access to opportunities for actors engaged in countering educational poverty. As a specific empirical phase and output of SCOPERTA, this work reports findings from an empirical study conducted in the urban context of Catania, focusing on educational networks operating in areas affected by persistent socio-educational disadvantage.

The study contributes to sociological debates on educational poverty, conceptualised as a structurally multidimensional phenomenon that cannot be reduced to economic deprivation or limited educational provision. Rather, educational poverty is understood as the outcome of relational and institutional inequalities and uneven access to opportunities. Within this framework, educational networks are conceived as key social infrastructures: their configurations shape the circulation of resources, the accessibility of support, and collective capacity to respond to social needs.

Methodologically, the study adopts a mixed-methods design integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches. Secondary institutional data and documentation were analysed to reconstruct the local socio-educational context and to identify urban areas at higher risk of educational poverty. Questionnaires were administered to teachers and relevant operators. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with school actors (including principals and teachers in coordination roles), alongside representatives of third-sector organisations, families, and other local stakeholders involved in student support. Interview data were also used for network elicitation to identify additional actors and collaboration ties. Social network analysis was then applied to the resulting reported networks, focusing on network density, central actors, and brokerage roles, and examining how different relational configurations enable—or constrain—access to educational opportunities and coordinated responses.

A central contribution is the comparison between “official” mappings of educational sites and services and the representations emerging from fieldwork. By examining the gap between institutional listings and practice-based accounts of operational ties, the study problematises local governance mechanisms and assesses whether existing representations capture the complexity of educational networks on the ground. Empirical materials were synthesised through a mapping workflow that led to the construction of digital maps of educational networks, conceived both as analytical devices for visualising relational complexity and as resources made available to the local educational community. The work concludes by discussing the analytical and practical potential of integrating social network analysis and digital mapping to support reflexive governance and coordinated action in unequal urban contexts.