Conference Program

Educational poverty cannot be reduced to insufficient schooling or low achievement scores. It designates a structural condition that limits access to the forms of knowledge required for critical participation in democratic life and democratic deliberation. Rather than representing merely an educational deficit, it can be interpreted as a mechanism of cultural domination operating through institutional arrangements, curricular choices, and embodied dispositions shaped by unequal access to cultural capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977).

From a Gramscian perspective, education plays a decisive role in the production of consent and in the consolidation of hegemonic projects (Gramsci, 1971; Thomas, 2009). When curricula are progressively simplified and intellectual ambition is lowered in the name of efficiency or performativity, the issue is not merely pedagogical adjustment but the potential erosion of the cultural capacities necessary for active citizenship. Educational poverty thus becomes a terrain where struggles over cultural leadership, knowledge hierarchies, and the role of intellectuals unfold. Teachers and professors can be understood as potential organic intellectuals whose practices contribute either to the reproduction of dominant cultural hierarchies or to the development of critical reflexivity capable of challenging symbolic domination (Baldacci, 2017).

Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence deepens this analysis by illuminating how inequalities are reproduced through the internalization of objective structures and through processes of misrecognition that transform structural limits into perceived personal inadequacies (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu, 1991). The unequal distribution of cultural capital and the normalization of modest educational expectations may reinforce democratic fragility by constraining individuals’ capacity to critically interpret information circulating across traditional media, digital environments, and AI-mediated systems.

Bringing Gramsci’s theory of hegemony into dialogue with Bourdieu’s relational sociology enables a multi-level understanding of educational poverty that connects macro-level power relations with micro-level dispositions and practices. Such a synthesis highlights the political responsibility of educators and public intellectuals in resisting the narrowing of knowledge and in fostering reflexive capacities among socially disadvantaged students, thereby counteracting processes of symbolic domination and contributing to the renewal of democratic participation (Burawoy, 2012; Wacquant, 2004).