Conference Program

In post-democratic educational systems, student participation is frequently institutionalised yet substantively neutralised, reduced to consultative rituals within adult-centric governance structures (Sousa & Ferreira, 2024; Fielding, 2013; Hope, 2012a; Lundy 2007). Against this backdrop, this paper presents preliminary insights from an ongoing comparative doctoral project, “RE-DE-PART - Remagining Democratic Participation”, investigating how participatory and visual methodologies can both document and reconfigure democratic participation in secondary schools.

Grounded in the UNCRC (1989) and operationalised through Lundy's model of participation comprising space, voice, audience, and influence (Lundy, 2007; Lundy et al., 2011), the research adopts a qualitative, comparative (Yin, 2018) and participatory design (Pastori, 2017; Mantovani 2007) across three European upper-secondary schools characterised by distinct governance configurations. Particular attention is devoted to participatory video (Colucci, 2016; Lunch et al. 2006) and online video elicitation (Tobin et al., 2010) as epistemic, pedagogical and political devices capable of unsettling adult-centric regimes of knowledge production.

Rather than positioning young people as informants, participatory video reconfigures them as narrative agents and co-constructors of meaning. Through video diaries and collaboratively produced micro-documentaries, students document lived experiences of listening, exclusion, deliberation and influence. These artefacts are subsequently mobilised in transnational online video elicitation sessions, enabling dialogical comparison across contrasting democratic ecologies. The methodology thus becomes not only a tool of inquiry but a site where democratic practice is enacted and contested (de Lange & Geldenhuys, 2012; Rogers, 2016).

However, this repositioning generates acute ethical tensions. First, power asymmetries persist even within participatory designs: who frames the research questions, curates visibility, and ultimately authorises dissemination? Second, visibility itself is ambivalent. While participatory video amplifies voice and challenges epistemic marginalisation, it simultaneously exposes participants to institutional scrutiny, reputational risks and the politics of representation. Third, questions of epistemic authority emerge: are students recognised as legitimate interpreters of democratic life, or are their narratives reabsorbed into adult analytic frameworks?

Preliminary findings from the two highly participatory schools suggest that visual methodologies cultivate reflexive awareness of participation as lived power, revealing both enabling infrastructures (deliberative assemblies, sociocratic circles, negotiated curricula) and subtle reproductions of hierarchy. In the Italian case, operating within a more traditional governance structure, participatory video acts as a catalyst for intergenerational dialogue and as a lever for subsequent participatory intervention aimed at redistributing influence.

The paper argues that participatory video, when embedded within a critically reflexive and ethically negotiated framework, can contribute to epistemic justice by challenging credibility deficits and supporting students as legitimate knowers (Fricker, 2007; Burroughs & Tollefsen, 2016). Yet such transformation demands sustained negotiation of consent as process, collaborative management of research outputs, and a grounded redistribution of power. The question, therefore, is not merely whether children can speak or film, but whether educational institutions are willing to be transformed by what they reveal.