Conference Program

Gender equality remains a crucial horizon for democratic renewal, yet contemporary educational systems continue to reproduce deep gendered and racialised hierarchies. This paper explores how feminist and antiracist youth activism can function as a transformative pedagogical force for rethinking gender, citizenship, and power in education. Drawing on qualitative research with young women and LGBTQ+ activists with migratory backgrounds in contemporary Europe, the study examines how grassroots practices emerging from feminist collectives, online platforms, and community-based networks create alternative spaces of learning beyond institutional schooling.

These activist environments operate as informal pedagogies in which gender norms, racialised exclusions, and colonial legacies are critically contested through intersectional and embodied forms of knowledge production. In contrast to dominant curricula that often neutralise or marginalise feminist and queer perspectives, these practices articulate education as a site of struggle, recognition, and empowerment. Young activists challenge restrictive understandings of belonging and citizenship, exposing how gendered power is intertwined with migration regimes, socioeconomic vulnerability, and cultural othering.

The paper adopts an intersectional and decolonial lens to analyse how these learning spaces disrupt Eurocentric and patriarchal assumptions embedded in educational institutions. In line with feminist pedagogy, the findings highlight the role of storytelling, counter-narratives, collective care, and cultural production as tools for building critical consciousness and political agency. These practices not only support individual empowerment but also foster solidarities and forms of inclusive leadership that contribute to gender-just democratic imaginaries.

Particular attention is paid to how activist pedagogies confront gender norms relationally, including the negotiation of masculinity, community expectations, and institutional resistance. Rather than positioning gender equality as a formal policy goal, these experiences reveal it as an ongoing educational process grounded in lived realities and collective mobilisation.

The paper argues that integrating feminist, queer, and intersectional approaches inspired by grassroots activism into Human Rights Education and citizenship education can enhance their transformative potential. In a context of rising gender backlash, xenophobia, and democratic erosion, such pedagogical practices offer crucial insights for dismantling gender hierarchies and reimagining education as a democratic project of social justice, plural belonging, and emancipation.