Conference Program

The body is the place where the cultural and political representation of the individual is enacted, and it appears as the product of a rhizomatic system that renders it mutable and polysemic, a material reality made of flesh and bones, but also a construct shaped by clothing, habitus, and symbolic devices. This complexity positions the body in liminal spaces, boundary territories without a defined belonging, where identities and meanings intertwine in hybrid forms. From this emerge different ways of conceptualizing the body: the body-as-matter, bearer of signs open to semiotic interpretation, the lived and embodied body rooted in phenomenological perspectives; the technological and cyber body, as in Haraway’s analyses (1995); the political body in Butler (1993), Arendt (1998), Foucault (1975) and Bauman (1992).

The body becomes a site where power, resistance, and possibilities for transformation are inscribed. This political body becomes a space of rights, expression, and participation inviting us to rethink educational contexts as places where each bodily subjectivity may be recognized, protected, and valued. Educating through and about the body therefore means cultivating democratic practices based on listening and reciprocity. Although dance is not intrinsically political, it acquires political significance when it occupies and transforms cultural and social spaces. Starting from these premises, this contribute investigates the meaning of dance as a political and social practice and explores the pedagogical role of the body and movement in intercultural schools (Massa 1986), in order to understand how dance can contribute to the democratic, critical and relational formation of individuals.