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Conference Program

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Daily Overview

Session

E.09. Spaces of Commons in Education: Learning Democracy through Practices of Togetherness (1/2)
Location: Scienze Politiche (CU002): Aula XII (Multimediale)

Convenor(s): Stelios Pantazidis (University of Thessaly, Greece); Yannis Pechtelidis (University of Thessaly, Greece)

Presentation 4

Educational Commons and Youth Activism: Reinterpreting Processes of Change in Rural Schools through a Bourdieusian Lens

Mauro Giardiello¹, Rosa Capobianco²

1: University of Roma Tre, Italy; 2: University of Roma Tre, Italy

Bourdieu's theoretical perspective has almost always been employed to interpret the processes that reproduce inequalities. This contribution, however, aims to explore the possibility of applying the Bourdieusian model to the analysis of transformation processes, situating it within the paradigm of education as a common good (Laval and Vergne, 2021). In literature, the paradigm of education as a common good is understood as a process that redefines the educational experience, structuring itself through participatory and co-design practices that enhance subjectivization. The aim of this paper is to understand how practices of "educational commons" can foster youth activism (Conner et al. 2024) and foster individual and community change in rural areas affected by depopulation and community fragmentation. Using the categories of field, habitus, and cultural capital, we analyze how the transformation of the educational model produces a reconfiguration of the educational field through the attempt to subvert the rules of the game and the dominant doxa. This process involves a restructuring of young people's habits, challenging the hierarchies of epistemic and symbolic power and the vested interests of dominant social groups. This implies a shift in their positions as legitimate agents of knowledge capable of interpreting, producing, and disseminating processes of change.
The study applies this theoretical framework to a revealing case study of a school located in a rural community in southern Italy (Giardiello and Capobianco, 2026).
The research, based on a qualitative approach, analyzed the film club project using unstructured interviews with the teacher who conceived the project and with families, and focus groups with students. The results show that education as a common good can not only be a transformative tool, redefining young people's capital and habits, but also allows us to observe the emergence of forms of resistance stemming from an adult-centric culture and limitations related to the difficulties in creating synergistic and non-self-referential networks among community stakeholders.