Conference Program

In Italy, access to full civic belonging remains deeply shaped by the citizenship regime based on jus sanguinis (Law 91/1992). As a result, many young people who were born in Italy or arrived at a young age remain legally classified as foreigners, profoundly shaping their material relationship to rights, recognition, and belonging. These dynamics are mirrored within the school system itself, where students without Italian citizenship are addressed as future members of the Italian community and socialised into the values and responsibilities associated with civic participation, while remaining excluded from the rights that full legal status entails. The classroom thus becomes a paradoxical space in which young people are symbolically socialised into full membership while empirically positioned as outsiders.

Literature has shown how national identity has been historically shaped through racialised distinctions, including colonial imaginaries and North-South divides (Giuliani & Lombardi-Diop, 2013). When these historical processes remain marginal within educational narratives, students are encouraged to develop civic competencies without fully confronting the histories that structure contemporary inequalities and exclusions. Consequently, schools actively reproduce a distinction between “unmarked” Italians and “foreigners,” categories that frequently map onto racialised hierarchies of belonging.

This presentation examines how racialised Italianness, understood as an analytical assemblage that embeds cultural and political horizons, is produced and contested at the intersection of history and civic education in Italian upper-secondary schools. These tensions reveal an epistemic gap between the two domains: while civic education aims to promote democratic participation and inclusive belonging, history curricula often reproduce narratives of national innocence and cultural homogeneity that leave little room to critically address racialisation and the historical construction of Italianness. The paper explores how civic education laboratories and participatory learning activities can help address this gap, fostering more critical and equitable forms of civic formation for students.

Drawing on Foucauldian approaches to discourse (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014; Foucault, 1972), Hall’s (2017) conceptualisation of race as a floating signifier, and assemblage thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), the study approaches Italianness as a contingent formation continuously produced and negotiated through educational knowledge and practice. To investigate how these processes operate within schooling, the research combines critical discourse analysis of ministerial curricula and directives with ethnographic fieldwork in upper-secondary schools in Turin.

Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of participatory workshops conducted with fourth- and fifth-year students, using methods such as problem-based learning and scenario-based discussions. The workshops invited students to critically engage with questions of belonging and historical responsibility. By bringing historical narratives into dialogue with civic questions of equity and participation, these activities sought to address the epistemic gap between history and civic education identified earlier. Preliminary findings suggest that dominant narratives of national innocence and normative whiteness produce epistemic silences around colonial histories and contemporary racial hierarchies. At the same time, moments of hesitation, discomfort, and debate reveal the pedagogical potential of civic education as a space where taken-for-granted narratives of national identity can be critically examined and reimagined.