Conference Program

If educational poverty is a widespread phenomenon closely linked to social inequality, it is clear that one of its main repercussions has political implications in a broader or narrower sense. On the one hand, this can be investigated in terms of politics as a circumscribed field, whose boundaries, according to Bourdieu (1996, 2000), are subject to possible and continuous reconfigurations. On the other hand, there is a broader meaning of politics that informs active citizenship, expressing itself and manifesting itself in different areas and which, with Dewey (2020), we could define as a democratic lifestyle based both on a democratic faith (Dewey 1966) and on the constant experimental monitoring that it requires and presupposes for further innovation (Dewey 1971, 2018, 2023). With regard to the first aspect, if we focus our attention, for example, on the Italian case, the de-democratising nature in terms of the over-representation of the upper-middle classes in elected office alone was already evident in the early 1990s (Mastropaolo 1993), not coincidentally corresponding to the decline of mass parties, which in turn nevertheless had an impact on the political alienation of the subordinate classes (Bourdieu 2001; Girometti 2020). On the other hand, if we take as a relevant criterion of political participation its expression in terms of active citizenship, it cuts across different areas and calls into play a series of constantly redefined knowledge, skills and competences, whose (at least) tendency towards universalisation is the stakes of an effective democratic politics in progress. In this sense, from a more strictly theoretical point of view, it becomes crucial to try to shed light on the different modes of action and reaction that social actors are able to activate in their confrontation with the (not only) social environment. Precisely for this reason, a comparison between Dewey’s and Bourdieu’s proposals, focusing mainly on the similarities, not ignored by Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Waquant 1992), between the concepts of habit and habitus (Dewey 2025; Bourdieu 1979; Colapietro 2004; Bogusz 2012; Crossely 2013; Piroddi 2018) could be useful for understanding the processes of differentiation and the related forms of social domination that are established between social groups. By retracing the common and divergent features of the two perspectives, primarily in terms of socialisation and interested life (Santarelli 2019), we will attempt to restore the richness of the two paths and suggest a possible integration. This could prove fruitful both as an analytical tool and as a means for political intervention in the sense of a democratisation of democracy.