Conference Program

Contemporary schools operate within a growing structural tension: students do not share the same legal status of citizenship, and nationality lacks a single, widely accepted definition. This condition particularly affects second generations, often situated between multiple belongings, partial institutional recognition, and ambivalent social expectations. In this context, schools are called upon to reinterpret the res publica as a set of shared rules, affective orientations, and forms of habitus capable of sustaining coexistence in increasingly heterogeneous societies.

The transformations of sovereignty (Galli, 2019) and the rise of populism and anti-politics (Mastropaolo, 2005) signal a broader crisis of institutional mediation that also involves schools. From a figurational perspective inspired by Norbert Elias, these developments can be understood as reconfigurations of the chains of interdependence underpinning political life. Democratic crisis thus appears not as a sudden rupture, but as tension within civilizing processes, with the risk of decivilizing spurts and dynamics of decivilization (Delmotte, Górnicka, 2021).

Within this framework, the school can be interpreted as a figuration-based survival unit: an institutional space through which society preserves the continuity of political integration under conditions of growing complexity. It plays a key role in the intergenerational reproduction of social order, bridging primary socialization and the formation of civic habitus. Delmotte and Duchesne (2024) show how national habitus begins to form in early family practices that naturalize belonging. School is the arena where such dispositions can be reworked in a civic-republican direction. For second generations, however, this transition may be discontinuous when implicit models of nationality conflict with plural identities.

When schools lose legitimacy as spaces of mediation, particularistic affiliations—cultural, religious, or communal—may prevail over civic belonging. Students may feel insufficiently recognized as members of the political community and perceive school as a classificatory rather than emancipatory institution (Darmody and Smyth, 2023). European data indicate that students with a migrant background face higher risks of early school leaving (European Education Area, 2024). Systematic reviews (Di Lisio, Fernández and Serrano, 2025) highlight the combined effects of socioeconomic disadvantage, family cultural capital, and language barriers, while dialogical and collaborative practices significantly reduce dropout rates (García Carrión et al., 2025), strengthening interdependencies among schools, families, and communities.

This contribution offers a theoretical-interpretive reconsideration, grounded in recent empirical research, of the school’s role in sustaining the res publica. Democratic resilience (Helled, Pala, 2025) is conceptualized not as a moral quality but as a figurational property rooted in the stability and transformability of networks of interdependence and in the reflective continuity of civic habitus transmission. In times of democratic crisis, the school’s task is not to produce immediate consensus, but to preserve the long-term conditions for possible political coexistence.