Conference Program

Starting from the theoretical framework of Transformative Education and the notion of positive peace (Galtung 2006), this contribution offers an interdisciplinary reflection, placing bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy (hooks, 2020; Bianchi, 2022) in dialogue with the Greek myth of Philoctetes (Milani 1879). The analysis seeks to rethink the margin not as a mere space of exclusion, but as a critical site of awareness, ethical responsibility, and transformative potential (hooks, 2021), in line with Peace Studies (Bartolucci 2025). In hooks’ pedagogy, the margin is ambivalent: a space of violence and silencing, but also of resistance, critical vision, and the construction of alternative and situated knowledge. This idea is juxtaposed with Philoctetes, a wounded and excluded hero whose isolation highlights the ethical contradictions of the community: without his voice and his wounded body, the collective endeavor cannot be realized. The ekphrasis by Philostratus (Imago 17), a Greek author of the second and third centuries A.C., translates this condition into image and narrative, transforming vulnerability into a device for ethical attention and creating a symbolic space where conflict can be observed, narrated, and discussed. This perspective connects with Galtung’s TRANSCEND method (2008), which, through creative dialogue and the search for shared solutions, demonstrates how valuing the voices of excluded subjects (positioned at the margins of dominant epistemologies and thereby making visible the epistemic mechanisms through which exclusion is normalized) can transform relationships and conflicts (Galtung 2006; 2008). In this way, attention to the margins – both in the myth of Philoctetes and in hooks’ pedagogy – becomes a practice of recognition and shared responsibility, contributing to the construction of a positive peace that goes beyond the mere absence of conflict by promoting equity and social transformation. In light of hooks’ engaged pedagogy, this space becomes an educational laboratory for listening, empathy, and shared responsibility. The picture book Skin Again (hooks & Raschka, 2004) is proposed here as a narrative tool to deconstruct prejudices related to otherness, adopting a decolonial approach that, as Borghi (2020) notes, encourages the recognition and dismantling of power structures that perpetuate coloniality in knowledge, bodies and imaginaries (Burgio 2022).