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.

Within contemporary national States, the inclusion of environmental issues within governments’ agendas, as well as the rise of collective actions to face climate change and ecological degradation, has favoured the emergence of what is defined as ‘sustainable citizenship’ (Micheletti et al., 2014).

As a ‘total relationship of being’ among individuals, the State, the market, and civil society, the idea of sustainable citizenship underlies a ‘lengthening in the chain of interdependence’ (Dunning & Hughes, 2013) between social agents and institutions. In this broad process, education plays a pivotal role. Particularly, schools and formal pedagogies are increasingly involved in addressing the more pressing preoccupation of our time, with key functions in socializing younger generations into the complexities of contemporary citizenship and appropriate behavior (Gabriel, 2024).

The Italian case is revealing. Law n. 92/2019 has introduced ‘civic education’ as a mandatory subject in both primary and secondary schools. The curricula revolve around three main topics: “constitution and legality”, “digital citizenship”, and “sustainable development”. Yearly, in each school, every class is required to implement educational activities on one of these topics, involving external stakeholders such as public authorities, associations and businesses.

The present paper elaborates the findings of an ethnographic research conducted in ten secondary schools of Milan to examine various initiatives dedicated to sustainability education (2022-2025) (Pedrini et al., 2025). Adopting an Eliasian perspective (Law & Mennel, 2023), this contribution aims to interpret the teaching initiatives on sustainability as a small-scale civilizing process.

Precisely, the analysis focuses on the discursive frameworks - e.g., ‘Agenda2030’, the ‘Green Deal’, and ‘changemaking’ - to which the observed projects refer, the techniques used to engage the younger generations, the practices of sustainability promoted, and the implicit construction of the figure of the desirable sustainable youth.

The argument stresses how school pedagogies absorb and reframe the demands, keywords, and methods of youth climate movements (Boltanski & Chiappello, 2007), by turning social critique within a ‘civilized’ perspective oriented toward social consensus. This reframing channels any expression of conflict into the realm of barbarism. From this interpretation, it emerges the identity of the ideal youngster: a climate-conscious subject committed to act for democratic transformation of society through productive-performative engagement within existing capitalist relations.

Moreover, a threefold ‘ambivalence’ – as integral to the critical Elias’ conceptualisation of the civilizing process (Burkitt, 1996) – are higlihted: first, the top-down imposition of democratization that is supposed to originate from below; second, the system’s capacity to appropriate every aspects of social critique and convey a ‘new spirit’ of (green) ‘capitalism’ (The Trilateral Commission, 2022); third, the contradiction between, on one hand, the demand for the individual’s total responsibility regardless of social disadvantages and priviledges, and on the other, the denial of any call for systemic challenge.

To conclude, while young people are expected, according to the established good manners, to learn to act decorously (Pavoni, Tulumello, 2023), governments legitimise authoritarianism as a dominant political culture, invest in society’s militarisation, and support wars initiated by Western countries worldwide.

This paper will argue that the relational concepts of John Dewey, a pioneer in the development of the concept of ‘democratic education’, can be integrated with Norbert Elias’s argument on long-term processes of civilisation. Although Norbert Elias did not explicitly address educational practice or the role of education in society, he was deeply interested in the development of the social learning processes of young children and adults. One integral aspect of the civilising process is that young children should eventually grow up through their own self-regulation. I introduce Elias’s important relational concept of love and learning to focus on the long-term individual civilising processes that young children undergo as they prepare for education in complex societies. The relation between love and learning is used as a sensitising concept to focus on the way in which young children’s educational development is both a cognitive and affective process, one that enables us to integrate the findings from other disciplines apart from sociology, especially from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology.

But how do processes of learning between adults and children relate to the development of a democratic habitus in learning between adults and children? To address this question, I compare Elias’s framework with Dewey’s account of education for democracy, focusing on the formation of democratic habits that are conducive to processes of thinking together. These habits facilitate intelligent action by predisposing persons toward seeking out and taking account of the perspectives of others. Dewey discusses one such democratic habit, which he names ‘the habit of amicable cooperation’ which he defines this as a habit “to treat those who disagree … with us as those from whom we may learn’. Such habits are formed through direct experiences with a democratic way of life in an educational environment which can facilitate the co-construction of educational encounters between teachers and children.

However, in contemporary societies the potential for these democratic processes of learning to be developed and embedded can be ‘blocked’ by teachers in educational institutions where it is assumed that pedagogy is mainly a rational, conscious and deliberate process. According to Winnicott (1964: 202-3), ‘The child, in learning to be civilised, naturally also feels frustrations acutely, and is helped in becoming civilised not so much by the teacher’s precepts as by the teacher’s own ability to bear the frustrations inherent in teaching’. Within this perspective, schools can be seen as anxious institutions where young children must exercise a more intensive and all-embracing control over their emotions. By refocusing on the unconscious processes of risk and uncertainty in the classroom, I will offer some suggestions for the ‘good enough’ school - a way beyond the dead-end approach of accepting or rejecting prescriptive advice on how to teach better or how to deal with ‘difficult’ pupils.

Norbert Elias considered the plasticity of the human psyche and habitus a fundamental premise of his theory of the civilizing process. As he pointed out, history exists because of the human capacity to learn (Elias, 2010). However, Elias did not make learning a specific object of theoretical analysis, instead relying on general notions of social learning and the internalization of external constraints into internal restraints (Elias, 2001). For Elias, the concept of social learning was sufficient for his purposes, since the central problem in his investigations of the civilizing process was the formation of conscience – the superego – across different social strata and states in Europe.

A particular line of Elias’s research concerned the sociology of knowledge (Elias, 2009). Elias’s lifelong interest in this subject culminated in his last book, The Symbol Theory (Elias, 2011), in which he discussed the long-term interconnections between knowledge, communication, and thinking. In this work he came close to understanding of what cultural-historical psychology conceptualizes as higher psychological functions, although this line of inquiry remained unfinished.

A central argument of cultural-historical psychology is that higher psychological functions develop through the mastery of cultural means of mediation, such as language. Through mastering these means, individuals gain control over their own psychological processes. With the development of reflexivity, individuals become able to form psychological systems – what Vygotsky called “tertiary connections” – which enable willful, conscious, and relatively free behavior (Vygotsky, 1997). According to Vygotsky, children’s psychological development occurs within specific social situations of development, and participation in educational institutions plays a crucial role in this process (Vygotsky, 1998). As young people master cultural forms of behavior, they become active subjects of learning and of their own psychological development.

Experimental and ethnographic studies of cognitive skills conducted by Luria demonstrated that education and socialization foster the transformation of the psyche, leading to changes in the systemic and semantic organization of consciousness (Luria, 1976). Leont’ev further developed this perspective by proposing the concept of learning activity as a specific form of psychological development. In the learning process, individuals master ways of acting and operations with tools and signs that encapsulate the cultural-historical experience of humanity, thereby appropriating practical and theoretical skills developed throughout history (Davydov, 1996). Engeström later extended the concept of learning activity, arguing that in late modernity it has become a central form of activity through which learning subjects, including adults, can develop their intellectual and creative capacities by mastering existing systems of activity and generating new ones (Engeström, 2019).

This paper argues that some of the key concepts from cultural-historical psychology and activity theory, such as higher psychological functions, zone of proximal development and learning activity, help to better understand the role of education in the civilizing processes. These two approaches provide analytical tools for explaining how education contributed to functional democratization by specifying the learning mechanisms through which individuals acquire culturally mediated forms of self-regulation and autonomy, and how civilizing processes have continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through institutionalized learning.

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This contribution draws on Gilliam and Gullov’s demonstration of the school as a key site for the civilising process (2024), extending this approach to specifically focus on the learning of “detachment”. This article draws attention to the fact that, in his 1956 article of the same name, Elias introduces the continuum of human behaviour between involvement and detachment through the evolutions in human attitudes towards natural as compared to social events. Based on this, this article questions way schools approach the learning and teaching of contemporary crises, specifically climate education and citizenship education. It suggests that in both these curriculum areas, teaching is marked by attempts at Eliasian “detachment” and the evacuation of emotional engagement, in response to anticipated emotional reactions by students that are implicitly seen as problematic by educators (Bozec, 2018; Albion et al., 2025). In addition to education literature on the adequacy of these programmes and literature on the importance of affect in understanding democratic behaviour (Neuman et al., 2007; Neckel and Hasenfratz, 2021), this contribution draws on qualitative interviews in France and Belgium with young people themselves (age 10-17), to explore their perspective on involvement and detachment in this learning. Using this empirical approach, it asks whether the evacuation of emotional engagement in the pursuit of scientific, objective detachment in this learning has not contributed to the learning of disinterest, which may constitute a barrier to democratic engagement by young people. By extension, the article explores how the “civilised armour” (Elias, 2012) and the pursuit of “high levels of detachment or objectivity”(Elias, 1956, p. 240) that students learn at school might in fact encourage emotional responses to contemporary crises, such as disinterest or even resentment, that are in tension with the engagement necessary for democracy.

Alpinism may appear as a niche and “exotic” practice, yet it offers a paradigmatic lens through which to observe broader processes of democratization that have traversed modernity and are now re-emerging in contemporary troubled times. Historically, alpinism has been an elite activity, not only socially but also in terms of the highly specialized skills, knowledge and embodied competencies it requires for minimizing intrinsic risks. In recent years—particularly in the post-COVID era—the growing popularity of mountain environments has been accompanied by significant transformations: the diffusion of romanticized experiential imaginaries through social media, increased accessibility and commercialization of mountain practices, and the availability of new technologies that contribute to a perception of reduced risk. This has led to the emergence of new practitioners “perhaps better equipped than experienced” (Johnston and Edwards, 1994), in a context further complicated by climate change, which renders already fragile high-altitude environments increasingly unstable and demanding in terms of skills and judgement (Mourey et al., 2019a).

In this context—also marked by growing mistrust in expert knowledge—revisiting Elias allows us to explore how dispositions such as autonomy, judgement and responsibility are not given but socially produced within specific configurations of learning and practice.

Addressing the panel’s question concerning how educational processes contribute to democratization, this paper examines the Italian case of alpinism schools within the Club Alpino Italiano (CAI), a state-recognized institution whose training activities operate as voluntary associations within the civil sphere. These schools constitute spaces of socialization in which shared values, forms of solidarity and civic belonging are produced, while simultaneously fostering embodied dispositions related to autonomy, responsibility and risk management.

After briefly outlining the process of the quasi-sportivization of Italian mountaineering—which led to the emergence of CAI schools—and the subsequent process of democratization, both closely intertwined with broader Italian socio-political developments and reconstructed through documentary analysis, the paper draws on an enactive ethnography, complemented by visual and creative methods, to analyse alpinism and rock climbing courses as institutionalized yet non-formal sites of learning. It shows how instructors do not substitute action—as in traditional guided climbing—but contribute to the formation of an expert habitus capable of acting under conditions of uncertainty. In this sense, autonomy emerges not as an individual attribute, but as the outcome of a relational and processual configuration of interdependence.

By integrating Elias’s figurational approach with a focus on the material-natural environment - the paper conceptualizes risk-taking and management as an embodied, relational and socially mediated practice, rather than as an individual choice. It argues that expert knowledge does not eliminate uncertainty but enables practitioners to navigate it as an irreducible dimension of mountain environments in which zero risk does not exist. In doing so, the paper contributes to understanding how processes of functional democratization (Elias, 2012 [1970]) unfold within non-formal educational settings, through the embodied formation of subjects capable of responsible action.