Conference Program

While the French rap scene was significantly shaped by the voices of young people with migrant backgrounds from the banlieues since its origin in the 1980s (Hammou, 2012), postcolonial identities and imaginaries in the Italian “rap game” have gained cultural and commercial relevance only in the past decade (Ardizzoni, 2020; Calò, 2012). Today, the multivocal mosaic of postcolonial rap challenges the often patronizing and criminalizing media and political narratives surrounding post/migrant youth from working-class or underclass backgrounds in the Italian suburbs through its own codes (Fabbro, 2025; Saitta, 2023; Sarti, 2025). Recent statistics indicate that these youths represent the most socially and educationally disadvantaged group in the Italian education system (INAAP, 2021; INVALSI, 2025; MIM, 2024). This situation underscores that even pedagogic discourse (Bernstein, 2000) in Italy is not exempt from power asymmetries, especially along the lines of class and ethnicity (Arena, 2025; Hakuzwimana, 2024). Schools thus emerge not only as sites of instruction, but also as spaces where recognition, misrecognition, and symbolic exclusion are produced and contested.

This research draws upon decolonial revisitations of Bernstein’s concept of pedagogic discourse (or device) (Hlatshwayo, 2024; Parada & Whatman, 2025) to examine educational disadvantage by looking at how young post/migrant artists (e.g. Baby Gang, Chadia, Ghali, Lorenzza) rap about their formal and informal education experiences. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis (Rogers, 2018), this study analyzes a targeted sample of rap songs and corresponding music videos to explore how educational experiences are represented and which pedagogic discourses are contested, negotiated, or upheld. By mobilizing a decolonial lens, rap lyrics and music videos are approached as sites of knowledge production, where schooling, street education, family socialization and racialized surveillance intersect. Finally, findings are discussed to provide some epistemological insights into the challenges face by Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy (Adjapong & Allen, 2024; Edmin, 2016). By foregrounding the voices of post/migrant rappers, the article reflects on the possibilities and limits of incorporating subaltern cultural knowledge into formal education, asking whether and how rap can function not only as a pedagogical tool, but also as a critique of the pedagogic device itself.