Conference Program

It's difficult to measure the contribution that an intellectual like Antonio Gramsci made to the development of political thought during the twentieth century. Even under the most extreme conditions, the Sardinian philosopher managed to advance a series of lines of inquiry that became central to the historical and sociological disciplines. But above all, by his example, Gramsci demonstrated how an intellectual who truly wanted to take responsibility for being consistent with his own ideas should act. We also owe to him the idea that theory and practice must be intimately linked in any process of social transformation. And at the heart of this conviction is the reasoning put forward in notebook number 12 of the work carried out in prison, which laid the foundation for a more comprehensive reflection on the relationship between politics and pedagogy, and between pedagogy and militancy. This framework provides a very broad framework in which the intimate relationship that Gramsci believed had to be established between those who performed an educational role (the teacher, as we would say today) and those who found themselves in the position of receiving stimuli (the student) emerges, demonstrating how this relationship was much more complex than was generally perceived within the organizations of the workers' movement.

The relationship between school, democracy, the construction of socialism, the economy, and culture were framed in those pages within a comprehensive, rather than unilateral, vision of education, because Gramsci was seeking to organize a complex political-educational framework and to imagine the role that school could play for those who cared about the defeat of fascism and the affirmation of socialism.

This reflection is crucial if we apply it to the world of sport, because it helps us understand how negative and unacceptable, for anyone who cultivates the desire to see our society transformed in a progressive direction, the idea that one can separate these closely related spheres is. Educating informed citizens is a goal that cannot be separated, except at great cost, from an athlete's development, regardless of the technical level one aims to help them achieve.

The value of sport and the possibilities for transforming or reproducing what already exists are part of a dialectic that is too often resolved by penalizing a global vision and instead affirming a partial and very limited specialization, the social and political costs of which are very high. Only by freeing ourselves from this vision and from a "technical" approach to sport will we be able to build contexts not exclusively devoted to the reproduction of what already exists, but instead functional to its transformation.

Through Gramsci and others many authors who have been inspired by his work in various ways, we will attempt to demonstrate how it is even more important today than ever before to reclaim a space within a phenomenon that is becoming pervasive in our society, whose consequences in terms of cultural and political regression are, in our opinion, devastating.