Conference Program

The co-production of community knowledge presents the challenge of mutual understanding across languages, cultures and constantly changing contexts. The promotion of Learning Communities (LCs) is also facilitated through pedagogical research oriented towards decoloniality, in which participants can actively engage (Kindon et al., 2017; Lenette, 2022). In this sense, it is worthwhile to develop pathways of ‘experiential research’ aimed at generating processes and outcomes that have a significant impact on the quality of life within communities, taking into account the diverse characteristics of LCs (Deluigi, 2024; 2026). In this collaborative framework, all participants contribute to the creation of knowledge, guided by objectives shared by an open and dynamic group that identifies with common interests, closely tied to concrete realities (and therefore subject to change). Throughout the various phases of work and self-exploration, a culture of learning is fostered, drawing on joint reflection and auto-ethnographic insights linked to the strategies and actions implemented (Bianchi, 2025; Gariglio, 2025). This leads to the enhancement of widespread learning; consequently, knowledge becomes the group’s heritage and does not belong to a single expert figure, often external to the community.

Promoting processes of co-creation, in which the agency of those who initiate or facilitate the path is oriented towards fostering active community environments, restores a tangible and recognisable value to participation (Chick et al., 2025; Kapoor-Jordan, 2009). Paradigms that favour reciprocity, moving away from extractive practices, are committed to building spaces for dialogue to be understood as a genuine process of shared consciousness-raising amongst those participating in action research, as subjects and agents of problematising diversity (Freire, 1987; 2010; Glissant, 1996). Decolonial educational research, therefore, fosters plural narrative spaces within LCs, activating non-rhetorical participatory movements (Hare, 2021; Muraca, 2021; Reason et al., 2008). In this sense, LCs become an indispensable subject for animating spaces of co-creation in which social innovation has a transformative value (Fabbri-Capaccioli, 2025; Sarkissian et al., 2010; Zoletto, 2023).

These framework elements enable us to retrace consolidated experiential action-research projects between the University of Macerata and several socio-educational services of the Koinonia APS Association, in Kilifi and Nairobi (Kenya), outlining some longitudinal features of participatory perspectives in a multi-faceted manner amongst: researchers who question their own critical positions and engage with many ‘elsewheres’, initiating explorations and new educational geographies; educators who work daily in the field, in situations systematically marginalised, placing proposals for emancipation and new horizons of a sustainable future at the forefront; university students who choose to be guided through a continuous mediation between theoretical knowledge, prefigurations and the lived experience of community; children, adolescents and young people who experiment with cooperative learning dynamics, charting trajectories of solidarity, peer mentoring and liberation from prescribed marginalisation (Cuccu, 2022; Deluigi, 2019; Deluigi-Cadei, 2019; Deluigi-Gozzelino, 2022; Deluigi-Aruba, 2023).

The paper will highlight the dynamic characteristics of decolonial research, engaged in actions that support LCs, which take shape in times and spaces that constantly activate reflective thinking and committed action as factors giving meaning to a ‘pedagogy on the move’ capable of adopting collateral perspectives.