Conference Program

Critical pedagogy has played a decisive role in challenging developmentalist and paternalistic constructions of childhood. By foregrounding dialogue, conscientisation and resistance, it repositioned children as thinking subjects capable of questioning domination and participating in democratic life. In doing so, it unsettled the notion of students as citizens in waiting and exposed schooling as a political space structured by power. This reorientation resonates with the recognition of children as rights holders in international frameworks such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly the right to participate in matters affecting them. Yet, despite its transformative ambitions, critical pedagogy often remains anchored in a model in which emancipation is achieved primarily through critical awareness and dialogic participation. While students may be invited to speak, reflect and contest injustice, the institutional architectures of schooling, including control over time, curriculum, spatial organisation, evaluation and legitimate knowledge, frequently remain intact. Political agency risks being framed as discursive expression without extending to shared governance of educational life, and participation risks becoming procedural compliance with rights discourse.

This paper argues that moving beyond these limits requires a conceptual shift from participation to commoning. Drawing on theories of the educational commons, democratic governance and childhood studies, it proposes the figure of the child as commoner. The child as commoner is understood as a political actor engaged not only in critique but in the collective stewardship of social and pedagogical arrangements. Educational commons are conceptualised as relational and institutional processes through which communities co create and co regulate norms, responsibilities, uses of space and forms of knowledge production. Democracy, in this sense, exceeds voice or consultation and becomes an ongoing practice of negotiating authority, redistributing responsibility and collectively designing shared rules. Children’s rights are approached not as abstract entitlements guaranteed from above, but as lived practices enacted through shared decision making and collective responsibility.

Revisiting central themes in critical pedagogy such as dialogue, power and emancipation, the paper interrogates their structural implications within contemporary neoliberal schooling. Without institutional reconfiguration, dialogic participation can be absorbed into managerial and performative logics, transforming critique into a pedagogical technique while leaving governance untouched. Commoning redirects attention to the material and organisational conditions that enable or constrain democratic co-determination. It foregrounds questions of who decides, under what conditions and through which collective mechanisms authority is exercised and redistributed.

This shift demands that democracy be enacted as an experiential practice in the here and now. If children are to exercise their rights meaningfully and contest existing arrangements, they must encounter and reshape them within everyday educational environments. Political agency emerges through situated practices of reclaiming space, exercising parrhesia, co deciding rules, co learning knowledge and co configuring the rhythms of classroom life. Inspired by commons based and Freinet influenced traditions, democratic formation unfolds through repeated collective practices that rework authority and responsibility in daily interactions. Children are therefore understood not only as rights holders or critical subjects, but as co-governors shaping the commons of schooling.

This communication examines how socially and economically marginalized youth enact political agency in relation to socio-ecological crises. In line with the symposium’s focus on youth as political actors, the study challenges the tendency to position young people as compliant and responsibilized future citizens rather than present participants in democratic life. It adopts a critical posture aimed at giving voice to youth, recognizing the diversity of their concerns, and exploring the spaces where they feel heard—as well as those where they experience frustration, invisibility, or political disregard (Gaudet et Caron, 2024).

The presentation draws on preliminary findings from an ongoing collaborative research project conducted in the Outaouais region (Quebec, Canada). The research team has worked with youth centres, animation teams, and facilitated group discussions with young people aged 12 to 17 across urban, rural, and peri-urban sectors.

In Quebec, youth centres (Maisons de jeunes) are non-profit community organizations dedicated to supporting adolescents aged 12–17 in becoming critical, active, and responsible citizens. Rooted in proximity-based and participatory approaches, they emphasize empowerment, voluntary and egalitarian relationships between youth and adults, and active involvement in decision-making processes. These spaces, therefore, offer a particularly fertile terrain for examining youth political agency beyond the formal structures of schooling (Cantin, 2023).

Data collection followed a bricolage methodology (Kincheloe, 2001), combining dialogic activities, collective mapping, visual artifacts, informal conversations, and recorded group exchanges. This methodological flexibility was designed to respect the needs and specificities of each youth centre and the lived realities of participants, rather than imposing a uniform research protocol. The approach aligns with the project’s commitment to epistemic justice and to recognizing youth as legitimate co-constructors of knowledge.

Rather than presenting definitive findings, the paper reflects on emerging analytical directions. Initial discussions suggest that youth articulate environmental concerns in ways closely intertwined with everyday experiences of inequality, territorial belonging, and recognition. The research pays particular attention to how youth describe moments of collective dialogue, instances of feeling politically ignored, and situations in which they perceive opportunities for action. Drawing on the capability approach (Deveaux, 2021), the study conceptualizes political capabilities as collectively constructed capacities to interpret shared conditions, deliberate about common concerns, and imagine transformative responses.

By situating youth centres as democratic spaces beyond school, this contribution expands the democratic imaginary to include socially and economically marginalized youth as present political actors. Recognizing their voices, tensions, and forms of resistance is not merely descriptive; it constitutes a normative commitment to renewing democracy in contexts marked by deepening socio-ecological injustice.

Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child offers a pivotal framework for recognizing children not as citizens-in-waiting, but as active political actors within their educational communities. This framework is fundamental to ensuring that rights are not merely stated but effectively practiced (Lundy, 2007). However, formal institutions often prioritize adult-led agendas and rigid hierarchical structures, effectively silencing students’ capability to influence their own educational paths (Ingold, 2018). Recognizing these dynamics is vital for establishing an inclusive environment where children’s perspectives are not just “heard”, but become a primary force in shaping school life (Balloo, 2023; Gupta, 2015; Gutiérrez, 2011).

This ongoing PhD research initiative centers on the co-construction of a “Third Space” (Bhabha, 2004; Tatham, 2025) within a middle school situated in the hinterland of Venice (Italy), a borderland region marked by marginalization and rich sociocultural diversity (Anzaldúa, 1987; hooks, 2009). Rather than a top-down intervention, this project conceptualizes the Third Space as a site of subjectivation—a vibrant arena where students’ lived experiences and institutional school culture intersect and transform one another (Biesta, 2024, 2021). Our objective is to investigate how young people, acting as protagonists of their own development, exercise their agency to reshape knowledge and identity through an ecological perspective (Biesta and Tedder, 2007). We view the school as a space where subjectivation occurs through students’ direct responsibility for decisions that impact their collective future, disrupting the conventional divide between formal education and students’ life-worlds (Ingold, 2018; Rantavuori & Sannino, 2026).

To realize these objectives, we adopt a participatory and horizontal methodology that breaks with traditional “extractivist” research (Mortari, 2016). A series of collaborative activities will engage teachers, students, and stakeholders not as subjects of study, but as co-researchers in shared brainstorming. This year we started the participant observation, the first round of collaborative semi-structured interviews with educational stakeholders, and interactive workshops with students to uncover the essence of the Third Space within this school (Sannino, 2010). The ongoing data analysis identifies both facilitators and potential challenges to sustain a thriving democratic space within the school context, encouraging all participants to critically reflect their interactions and power dynamics (hooks, 1994).

We are dedicated to a longitudinal approach and anticipate our next collaboration with the school community to produce a comprehensive research report. This initiative will culminate in an in-depth podcast that features student reflections, thereby providing a platform to amplify their voices as the primary agents of pedagogical innovation. The ultimate objective of this work is to explore how acknowledging student agency transforms the school and how it contributes to institutional change towards democratic and inclusive learning environments.

At this juncture in our ongoing research, we present our analysis of the initial round of semi-structured interviews, alongside data derived from participant observations. This data encompasses the roles of educational stakeholders, the challenges faced by teachers, the ways in which students experience and navigate the school environment, and preliminary considerations regarding the Third Space within the middle school context.

This co-authored paper, written by an adult scholar and a young person, examines children as present political actors whose everyday experiences in school reveal ongoing negotiations with power, authority and democracy. The collaboration itself is a deliberate enactment of the argument: that children are not citizens-in-waiting but legitimate co-producers of political knowledge. By sharing authorship, the paper seeks to live the democratic and intergenerational values it advocates.

The paper argues that children already participate in political life through subtle acts of compliance, resistance, solidarity and collective action within and beyond formal schooling. Drawing on Ivan Illich’s critique of institutionalized education and Foucault’s analysis of discipline and surveillance, contemporary schooling is situated within neoliberal structures that normalize hierarchy, performance and compliance. At the same time, Václav Havel’s notion of the “ideological excuse” helps illuminate how children strategically conform to institutional expectations in order to avoid sanction and preserve spaces of autonomy. The presentation will explore real-life examples of such ideological excuses, while privately disengaging, questioning or reinterpreting their experiences.

Building on James C. Scott’s concept of infrapolitics, the paper examines everyday forms of resistance, such as minimal compliance, quiet refusals, peer solidarities and selective participation, as “hidden transcripts” that coexist with public conformity. These practices reveal children’s political literacy and their capacity to interpret and negotiate institutional power without necessarily engaging in overt confrontation.

The paper also turns, briefly, to more visible collective struggles through Gramsci’s distinction between “war of position” and “war of manoeuvre.” Examples of war of position include sustained efforts to reshape school culture through student assemblies, curriculum discussions, and solidarity with teachers during disputes, as gradual attempts to transform common sense from within institutional spaces. In contrast, examples of war of manoeuvre include school occupations, coordinated walkouts and public protests. Such moments of direct confrontation expose the political character of schooling and disrupt established hierarchies.The paper focused more on "war of position".

Engaging critically with Hannah Arendt’s call for the depoliticization of education, the paper argues that schools are inherently political in their organization of time, authority and recognition. As such, the paper advances the concept of the Scholé as an alternative democratic imaginary: reclaiming time and space for shared inquiry, dialogue and collective reflection beyond narrow productivity regimes. In this vision, children are not merely being prepared for democracy; they are already enacting it through infrapolitics, solidarities and collective struggles in contested educational spaces.

The dominant debate on youth citizenship continues to question young people’s capacity to operate as autonomous and competent civic actors (Print, 2007; Wood, 2022), focusing on the characteristics that relegate them outside full citizenship rights: age, economic dependence on adults, and marginal social status (Biesta et al., 2009; Gordon, 2010; Kiilakoski, 2020). This entails that the democratic participation of younger generations is still frequently interpreted through the lens of crisis, apathy, or radicalisation (Loncle et al., 2018; Haidt & Lukianoff, 2018; Biffi, 2023).

However, student mobilisations and forms of youth activism that traverse schools and universities at national and transnational levels show that the issue does not concern a decline in participation, but rather a profound transformation of its forms, languages, and spaces of expression (Bressant, 2020; Brennan et al., 2022; Pickard, 2019; Taft, 2010; Pitti, 2025). These practices propose counter-narratives that value young people as political subjects capable of critically interpreting the social, educational, and symbolic conditions in which they are situated, recognising them as crucial actors for social change (White & Wyn, 2008; Shah & Khan, 2023).

Through the conceptualization of doing society (Eranti and Luhtakallio, 2024), this contribution proposes a pedagogical reading of youth activism as a practice of political learning and as a form of public pedagogy (Giroux, 2000; Biesta, 2012), questioning the role of formal educational contexts in processes of recognition, legitimation, or neutralisation of such experiences. Within this framework, a decolonial and intersectional reading allows us to analyse and understand how the coloniality of knowledge (Quijano, 2000; Walsh, 2012), supported by the current political landscape and contemporary ideologies, continues to shape curricula, educational practices, and the forms of participation recognised as valid. As a consequence, the voices of young people positioned at the margins due to cultural belonging, racialisation, gender, or class remain increasingly unheard.

In this context, youth activism represents a political space for the recovery and construction of new knowledge capable of challenging dominant cognitive hierarchies and of valuing education in its democratic and transformative function. Reconsidering educational contexts in light of activist practices and decolonial epistemologies (Santos, 2014) therefore means recognising young people as co-producers of knowledge and as political interlocutors, restoring centrality to education as an inclusive relational space, a site of power negotiation, of belonging construction, and of democratic participation.

Using empirical material collected for my PhD thesis, this abstract aims at understanding the concrete actions of educations policies claiming to « teach citizenship » to children, inside and outside of schools and their receptions by children. In France, in the aftermaths of the terrorist attacks of 2015, successive governments put clear emphasis on the so-called « éducation à la citoyenneté » (citizenship education). This teaching was designed to form pupils, from an early age all the way through their majority, to become politically active citizen and to engage accordingly in society (Barrère & Martuccelli, 1998; Xypas, 2003; Bozec, 2016). However, this program remains very unclear on the real meaning of its aim.

In this abstract, I will try to demonstrate two main points. Drawing on Patrick Rayou (2000), my work tries to show that the concept of citizenship, as intended in education policies, is notable for its vagueness and polysemy and should be regarded as a social and educational construct, whose definition is the subject of constant discussion and political wrestling. Among many points, public policies, both on national and local levels, have come short to provide a consensus on the topic of children political status in the making of policies regarding their direct environment. The question of children as political actors is therefore continuously unanswered and the political discourse is revolving around a voluntary blurring between a vision of children as future citizens and a vision of children as an actual citizen of the world in which he lives.

Secondly, this vagueness in political definitions has had consequences in the research both in the field of political sociology and of education sociology: depending on the vision of citizenship that is mobilized, children are to be considered either as political actors with an agency (Garnier, 2015) or as passive publics of public policies. I propose an approach inspired by the work of James C. Scott (1990) that allows for the development of a 'hidden transcript’ through which children, even in dispositifs (Foucault, 1993) that do not consider them as legitimate actors, present a critical discourse and seek to assert a certain number of positions. Using data from ethnographic observations, I will try to show how children develop resistance strategies in social relationships with adults that are more or less strict but always unequal.