Conference Program

Across Europe, renewed nationalist discourses and authoritarian turns have intensified struggles over collective memory, belonging, and the meaning of the nation. Schools are central to these struggles. While formally tasked with promoting democratic values and inclusion, they remain key sites where normative conceptions of national identity are reproduced through curricula, pedagogical practices, and everyday interactions. This presentation examines how racialised Italianness is produced, sustained, and contested at the intersection of history and civic education in upper-secondary schools, contributing to the decolonisation of dominant narratives of personhood and citizenship by challenging the construction of “othered” individuals as external to Italianness and foregrounding their constitutive role in its historical formation.

In Italy, individuals racialised as the “Other” continue to encounter exclusionary discourses shaping how citizenship and belonging are imagined and regulated across civic, political, and educational spaces. Since the 1990s, intercultural education policies have sought to address growing ethnic and racial diversity. Yet these interventions largely frame diversity as a problem to be managed, reproducing an implicit “we/Other” epistemic position (Burgio & Vaccaro, 2023) rather than interrogating the foundations of Italianness. National identity thus appears coherent, morally unified, and implicitly white, while racialised difference is constructed as external to the national body.

The literature shows how Italianness has been constituted through whiteness and Catholicism, and the myth of “Italians, good people” - a discourse of self-ascribed moral exceptionalism that legitimised colonial expansion and sedimented narratives of national innocence across Fascism and the post-war Republic (Del Boca, 2005; Giuliani & Lombardi-Diop, 2013). Yet these perspectives have only partially informed research and practice in history and civic education.

Rather than treating these subjects as neutral, the research conceptualises them as epistemic sites where authoritative narratives of the past intersect with normative prescriptions of civic virtue, shaping the present and producing racial hierarchies of belonging. Drawing on Foucauldian understandings of discourse (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014; Foucault, 1972), assemblage thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), and Hall’s (2017) conceptualisation of race as a floating signifier, Italianness is approached as a contingent and unstable formation continuously rearticulated through educational knowledge and practice.

The study combines critical discourse analysis of national curricula with ethnographic fieldwork in upper-secondary schools in Turin. Particular attention is paid to students positioned as “standard” or “unmarked” Italians to examine how normative whiteness is reproduced through seemingly neutral teaching practices. Teachers’ interviews and participatory workshops reveal how colonial histories are marginalised, racial continuities disavowed, and emotional tensions emerge when dominant narratives and language are unsettled.

Initial findings suggest that race operates as a structuring yet marginalised dimension of educational discourse, generating epistemic injustice that renders certain histories and racialised subjectivities peripheral. At the same time, moments of ambiguity and contestation expose the instability of these regimes of truth and point to the pedagogical possibility of decolonising national narratives. By interrogating how Italianness is normalised and whitened in schooling, the study contributes to debates on epistemic justice in postcolonial Italy and reflects on the potential of critical pedagogy to unsettle racialised common sense within education.