Conference Program

This contribution takes La grande fabbrica delle parole by de Lestrade as a theoretical device through which to interrogate the relationship between language, cultural poverty, and educational equity within the context of shared reading aloud. In the world depicted in the story, words have a price and are unequally distributed: language appears as a scarce resource, regulated by procedures that govern access to and use of it (Foucault, 1999; Foucault, 2020a). Poverty does not coincide with silence, but with the reduction of the symbolic repertoire and with the impossibility of participating in a space of speech (Giancola & Salmieri, 2024; Finetti, 2024).

On this basis, reading aloud is examined as a practice capable of intervening in linguistic inequalities when conceived dialogically (Pera et al., 2023; Salvato, 2024). Equity does not depend on exposure to words, nor on a quantitative expansion of vocabulary, but on the possibility of suspending, temporarily, the logics that administer their circulation (Biesta, 2023). Within this perspective, inequalities operate not only at a material level, but through regimes of representation that render them intelligible and acceptable within a historical episteme (Foucault, 2020a; Foucault, 1999); access to shared words does not abolish inequalities, yet it enables them to be named, to be withdrawn from processes of naturalization, and to be rearticulated in new forms (Dewey, 1992). Shared reading thus institutes a scene in which words can be taken up again, questioned, and transformed, and in which participants are recognized as legitimate interlocutors (Rosati, 2022).

The theoretical framework, developed in dialogue with Foucault, rests on a conception of language as a dispositif of power and subjectivation, where discourse is understood as a regulated practice that produces effects of truth and shapes what can be said, thought, and acknowledged as valid (Foucault, 1999; Foucault, 2020b; Foucault, 2014). Cultural poverty can therefore be reread as an effect of discursive regimes that delimit access to speech and its legitimacy (Finetti, 2024; Giancola & Salmieri, 2024).

The reference to Biesta clarifies the pedagogical implications of this analysis. Biesta criticizes the reduction of education to a measurable process defined in terms of learning outcomes and performance, proposing instead that education be conceived as a space of subjectification in which the subject may emerge not as a programmed result but as an unpredictable event (Biesta, 2023). In this framework, shared reading is not valued for its quantifiable effects on linguistic development; rather, it is understood as a practice that interrupts dispositifs of measurement and economies of performance, opening a space in which speech may circulate without being immediately translated into competence (Biesta, 2023; Illouz, 2024).

Reading aloud thus acquires a specific political valence, calling into question the discursive conditions that determine who may speak and with what authority (Foucault, 2020b; Foucault, 2019). The shared experience of the text becomes a laboratory in which access to language intertwines with the possibility of redefining what counts as common experience, rendering speech not merely an instrument of communication, but a site of democratic transformation (Dewey, 1992; Rein, 2025).