Conference Program

This paper reflect on Enhanced Games and their ambition to bring about value and cultural transformation, which includes the idea of developing an underlying pedagogy for humanity and its relationship with technical and scientific development. The contribution is based on a thematic analysis (Topic Modeling) and discursive analysis of the journalistic representation of this sports movement, given an acquired knowledge domain based on the deepening of official documents about the phenomenon.

Enhanced Games are a mega-sporting event in which athletes are invited to achieve the best performance ever recorded in three specific areas – swimming, track & field, and weightlifting – with the possibility of taking substances considered doping in official competitions, if this is declared and under the supervision of medical teams.

From a political and cultural view, the Enhanced Games organization aims to challenge and redefine various canonical principles of sport, while openly positioning itself within its commercialized and spectacularized dimension.

Behind this proposal to redefine the sporting canon lies a broader political and cultural challenge. Enhanced Games occupy a liminal area where the boundaries between different conceptual and social categories are called into question: natural and artificial, morality and dishonesty, health and disease, performance and amateur sport, legality and illegality, individual and system, right and obligation, freedom and coercion, innovation and conservation, honor and dishonor. While the project aims to highlight the social and conventional nature of these categories, it also seems to reveal a specific political and ideological orientation, with political-economic implications.

Thus, “The First Declaration on Human Enhancement” emphasizes individual freedom and full sovereignty over one’s own body, autonomy from coercion, and the right to take calculated risks, in compliance with national laws and health protection. It also emphasizes the need to promote technical and scientific innovation and to support the continuous development of human potential, while maintaining transparency and fairness in sports competition. These positions seem to reflect the influence of currents of thought that are not neutral from a cultural, economic, political, and social perspective.

In its current plans, the organization of the Games – presenting itself as a pioneering group in human development – proposes socialization based on a new set of values and renewed human criteria, indirectly promoting an unstoppable change in the reinvention of society. Against a cultural backdrop based on innovation, technical-scientific solutionism, and libertarianism, it proposes – through the field of sport – a cultural reform of the relationship between technology and personal and social development, suggesting a metamorphosis of social, legal, institutional, political, regulatory, and relational practices, primarily in the sporting context, but fundamentally useful for a cultural pedagogy with a broader social impact. That is to say, a value system – representative of certain political and economic elites – celebrating technical rationality, trust in ingenuity and technical-scientific innovations to solve humanity’s challenges, growth without constraints, individual liberation, the consecration of criteria of effectiveness and productivity, indirectly redesigning the framework of civil and citizenship rights and duties, as well as the relationship with technology and its risks.

Citizen science as a concept and practice has gained a lot of interest in the 21st century. Citizen science is commonly understood as voluntary public participation in scientific research by non-professional citizens. This participation can include gathering data for research, interpreting and analysing data or co-creating the whole research with scientists (Bonney et al., 2009). One of the defining features of citizen science is that participating citizens are not themselves the subject of study (Open Science Coordination in Finland, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, 2022). Alongside citizen science there is also citizen social science and citizen humanities. In my own work I understand citizen science in the Finnish context where the word “tiede” (science) covers all the different academic disciplines. Therefore, my usage of the word citizen science contains also citizen humanities and citizen social science.

Citizen science has been seen to contain great potential for conducting science education in both informal and formal settings (see e.g. Bonney et al., 2009; Lüsse et al., 2022). In the context of formal education citizen science can for example provide a way to foster critical thinking and problem-solving (Shah & Martinez, 2016) as well as to enhance multidimensional understanding of the relevance of science (Lüsse et al., 2022).

In the research concerning different educational aspects of citizen science there has also been discussion about the democratic possibilities of science education based on citizen science (see e.g. Mueller & Tippins, 2012; Gray et al., 2012; Oesterle et al., 2019). These studies have given a critical look to themes such as community, power-relations, local knowledge, nature of participation, critical agency, and the role of marginalized students.

In my own work I want to join this discussion by studying citizen science through the lenses of democracy education (see e.g. Männistö, 2020; Rautiainen et al., 2023). Democracy education contains the notion that democracy should be included to education in three different ways. The practice of education should be democratic, the content of education should be about democracy (i.e. critical understanding about society), and the relationship between schools and larger society should be interactional (Männistö & Fornaciari, 2017; Tomperi & Piattoeva, 2005). In my research I will compare these three aspects of democracy education with notions raised in the earlier studies concerning citizen science and science education. My goal is to broaden our understanding about the relationship between citizen science, democracy and education, and offer new insights on how citizen science could act as a form of democracy education.

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.

In the contemporary Mediterranean context, marked by rapid socio-economic transformations and brain drain; it is crucial to understand how to support young people in becoming agents of change. In this regard, youth policies contribute to evolving the welfare system from a traditional protective form toward an innovative and enabling one (Minervini, 2016). They play a fundamental role in providing personal and professional growth opportunities for young people who currently face increasingly significant challenges such as unemployment, social exclusion, inequalities, job insecurity, and mental health issues.
This contribution reconstructs the evolution of youth policies in the Puglia Region, focusing particularly on "Galattica – Rete Giovani Puglia" as a paradigm of collaborative governance and participatory urban regeneration. Through a sociological lens, the study investigates the socio-spatial transformations of the measure, drawing from the theoretical corpus of third places (Oldenburg, 1989) and third spaces (Bhabha, 1994; Soja, 1996)—viewed as spaces of cultural hybridity where identity, belonging, and social justice are negotiated.
The methodology adopts a mixed-methods approach based on the principles of realistic evaluation, combining focus groups with policy makers, semi-structured interviews with 9 regional youth workers, documentary analysis, and a multiple case study. This top-down logic allows for the reconstruction of strategies, challenges, and opportunities emerged during the first implementation cycle of the measure, providing a privileged perspective on governance mechanisms and implementation processes to understand "what works, for whom, in what circumstances, and why" (Pawson & Tilley, 1997).
The Galattica policy represents the evolution of Puglia’s regional urban regeneration strategies, activating 96 local "Nodes" as proximity spaces for providing information, orientation, and support, following a logic of co-design and shared governance based on the suspension of traditional institutional rules. Through the thematic mapping of 1,519 events promoted in local plans and 172 regionals program activities designed to meet identified local needs, the research categorizes five intervention clusters: economic and professional empowerment; rights and social inclusion; civic participation and active citizenship; personal development and well-being; culture, creativity, and sustainability.
Preliminary results highlight a transformative impact, such as socio-spatial changes and youth empowerment but also reveal governance challenges. In conclusion, this research intends to contribute to the debate on collaborative governance models in public policy, highlighting how experimenting with innovative forms of co-design can generate more effective solutions for the territorial and collective needs of young people navigating the phase currently defined as "emerging adulthood" (Arnett, 2000).
Through a sociological reflection on the Apulian model, the study explores the transformative potential of youth policies in countering the marginalization and commodification of urban space, highlighting how investing in the human and social capital of new generations can trigger urban regeneration processes capable of responding to the contemporary challenges of youth unemployment and the crisis of democratic participation.

In the current institutional and scientific debate on the relationship between sport and disability in Italy, there is a growing need to strengthen coordination between public, private and third sector actors through more robust territorial analysis (Cerbara, 2024). Statistical evidence shows that people with disabilities continue to experience structural disadvantage, often associated with more acute forms of material deprivation than the rest of the Italian population (Istat, 2019; UISP, SVIMEZ and Sport e Salute, 2023). In this context, disability cannot be defined exclusively in relation to the oppression caused by physical barriers, the spatial organisation of territories, or as a product of stigmatising representations, the result of categorising stereotypes produced by social, political and cultural processes of normalisation (Vadalà, 2013; Oliver, 2015; Travaglini, 2020) oriented towards integration rather than inclusion. While acknowledging the concrete limiting role of architectural structures, it is argued that it is the disabling power inscribed in dominant social models (Lettieri, 2013; Oliver, 2015) that determines the conditions of access, recognition and participation in democratic life. Within this scenario, marked by a broader crisis of democracy and the ability of individuals to influence decision-making processes (Oliver, 2015), Italian Paralympic sport takes on a dual significance. On the one hand, it reflects the discrimination faced by people with disabilities, as evidenced by the persistent lack of adequate facilities and limited participation in collective sporting life. On the other hand, it represents a field of innovation and experimentation for people with disabilities, in which, through shared and co-designed sporting activities, they are able to develop alternative forms of disabled subjectivity (Roets and Braidotti, 2012; Abrams, 2015), dismantling the myth of autonomous individuality and social utility (Vadalà, 2013; Travaglini, 2020), enhancing the capacity for action (Mura and Zurru, 2013; Oliver, 2015; Beneduce and Taliani, 2021) and determining processes of self-recognition freed from stigmatising and stereotypical views of disability (Jarman et al., 2002). Furthermore, sport has a unique ability to influence urban spaces: the need for dedicated infrastructure makes sport a privileged area for implementing inclusive and sustainable policies capable of generating positive effects that go beyond the initial objectives. Sport and disability are a strategic field of action for building, together with the communities concerned, a shared and self-determined culture of inclusion. In this context, the paper presents the initial results of a pilot study conducted in Italy, aimed at exploring the perspectives and practices of local actors involved in organising sporting activities for people with disabilities, with the aim of contributing to the definition of more effective and participatory models of inclusive governance.

When bottom-up social innovations emerging within civil society arise in response to collective needs that are not met by institutions or the market (Moralli, 2019; 2022), they can evolve into processes capable of reshaping collective imaginaries, social representations, and dominant rhetorics. In particular, when such practices become rooted in local contexts, they may contribute to the creation of spaces of sharing and cooperation that take on the characteristics of social and educational commons.

Drawing on an exploratory study of the practices and processes of social innovation promoted by young people under 35 living in Basilicata (South of Italy) and active in third sector organizations engaged in the social regeneration of the region’s inner areas, this contribution investigates how these initiatives generate spaces of collective learning, shared responsibility, and democratic participation. The analysis follows the young promoters of these initiatives through a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995), exploring practices, processes, and narratives of social innovation both on site and online, and observing how they contribute to the construction of forms of commoning within local territories.

The choice of Basilicata is linked to the fact that it is the southern Italian region experiencing the highest demographic decline (-7.4% in 2023, Svimez 2024) and the highest percentage of inner areas (Vespasiano, 2023), which are often characterized by difficulties in accessing essential services (education, healthcare, infrastructure) and by limited employment opportunities. In this context, some youth-led initiatives promote practices of territorial regeneration that transform social and cultural spaces into environments of sharing, learning, and collective care.

Against a dominant narrative that portrays these territories as “points of escape,” the young people involved reinterpret them as “vanishing points” from which to imagine and practice new forms of cooperation. Through these practices, local spaces become contexts in which knowledge, responsibility, and participation circulate horizontally among participants, contributing to the construction of democratic imaginaries grounded in the co-production of collective solutions.

The contribution therefore proposes to interpret youth social innovation practices in inner areas as processes of commoning that generate forms of collective learning and new practices of democratic citizenship in marginalized territories.