Conference Program

This contribution aims to investigate the relationship between studies on “les anormaux” in Michel Foucault and the French institutionalist movement’s research on the “débiles mentaux”. While Foucault’s studies reconstruct the genesis and emergence of a psychiatric power aimed at normalizing and confining deviant subjects, the psychoanalytic theories of Maud Mannoni and the practical experiments of Oury outline a path for removing children from the institutional circuits of medicine and pedagogy. This demonstrates that the movement for deinstitutionalization in France drew on diverse contributions which were able to (i) reconstruct the discourses of psychiatric power, (ii) oppose them with a counter-theory grounded in psychoanalytic anti-alienism, and (iii) offer practical experiments differently dealing with the spectrum of abnormality.

In his studies on the abnormal, Foucault insists on the emergence of a medical power that, through psychiatry, attempts to impose a normalization of behavior. On the one hand, a general theory of degeneration took shape; on the other, it was supported by a wide institutional network of control, internment, and care, situated at the boundaries of medicine and justice. This network functioned both as a structure for receiving the abnormal and as a defense of society. From that point onward, a technique of normalization and segregation was tasked with taking charge of the irregular individual.

Indeed, still in the postwar period in France, les débiles mentaux are placed in an institutional circuit of care and treatment that was essentially custodial in nature. In this sense, for Mannoni, the “transformative” effect — rather than merely “descriptive” — produced by diagnosis is very clear. So, she emphasizes the condition of emergence of the symptom reducing the organic explanation and instead pointing to the living conditions and situations that cause the “illness” to arise. The evolution of the patient in different contexts, in fact, challenges the notion of organic deficiency.

From an operational standpoint, it was Oury who developed the most promising responses along these lines. He organized space and time in the classroom in such a way as to enable a series of operations allowing children to exercise agency and speech within their living environment. Against the institution that compels silence, his techniques enable the classroom to become an open and therapeutic space capable of healing or providing prophylaxis—an environment within which it becomes possible to evolve, also through the recovery of autonomy and speech.

Thus, while in Foucault there is a denunciation of a power of normalization exerted upon the deviant child, the theories of Mannoni are able to disavow the theoretical foundations of segregation. Oury’s practices, in turn, offer a set of solutions through a counter-institutional form of schooling capable of welcoming the child rather than psychiatrizing them. All this constituted the theoretical and practical background for the emergence of a season of (de)institutional reforms in favor of people with disabilities, the mentally ill, the mad, and the abnormal of every kind. Rediscovering this legacy is particularly valuable today, at a time when new institutionalizing tendencies are reappearing in institutional practices and political orientations.

Throughout Western history, certain embodied subjectivities have been constructed as deviations from the dominant social order. Among these, the figure of the witch and the figure of the disabled person emerge in particularly emblematic ways, both inscribed within genealogies of marginalization that have produced representations of bodies perceived as monstrous and deviant (De Castro, Zona, & Bocci, 2022; Federici, 2004; Goffman, 1986). In cultural and media narratives, the witch is frequently portrayed as a deformed and morally suspicious bodymind, associated with dark powers and forms of knowledge not legitimized by patriarchy (Stanmore, 2024). Similarly, disabled bodies have historically been subjected to processes of stigmatization and control, constructed as defective or unproductive in relation to normative paradigms of productivity (Barnes,2016). Through such representations, media and visual cultures contribute to reproducing bodily hierarchies and to delineating the boundaries of the normative human.

Despite the growing scholarly attention devoted to these fields of research, the intersection between disability and representations of the figure of the witch remains largely underexplored, particularly with regard to the ways in which disabled bodymindes have historically been associated with forms of deviance and monstrosity analogous to those attributed to the witch.

This paper brings Witch Studies and Critical Disability Studies into dialogue in order to investigate how the witch and the disabled person have historically been produced as “other subjectivities” within cultural and socio-political regimes of normalization. Drawing on Crip Theory (McRuer, 2006), Feminist Disability Studies (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Kafer, 2013), and recent developments in Witch Studies (Chaudhuri & Ward, 2025), it explores the convergences between historical processes of persecution targeting non-normative embodied capacities and forms of knowledge that have contributed to defining the limits of what is considered acceptable and legitimate.

If, on the one hand, the figure of the witch and that of the disabled person have been used to mark the boundaries of the normative human, on the other they are today the object of processes of symbolic and political reappropriation. In several contemporary contexts, particularly within feminist and queer movements, witchcraft is being rearticulated as a spiritual and political practice that creates spaces of agency and collective care (Sollee, 2017). In some grassroots communities, contemporary witchcraft practices become spaces in which marginalized subjectivities reclaim their bodies and their forms of knowledge, challenging ableist and patriarchal narratives that have historically rendered them objects of stigma and shame.

Through a theoretical and interdisciplinary approach, this contribution therefore proposes to read the figure of the witch not only as a symbolic figure of marginality but also as a political and pedagogical practice of resistance (Hundley, 2020). The reappropriation of the witch can thus be interpreted as a form of crip counter-narrative: an imaginative and communal dispositif that redefines the relationship between the body, the mind and processes of political and identity reclamation, opening spaces for practices of care and self determination grounded in the embodied knowledges of marginalized subjectivities.

Contemporary media representations of disability in sport frequently oscillate between two dominant narrative frames: the depiction of the disabled body as a site of fragility, lack, or physical limitation, and the celebration of the disabled athlete as an exceptional figure capable of overcoming bodily constraints through extraordinary effort. Although apparently opposed, these representations rely on a shared assumption: the implicit centrality of an able-bodied model of performance against which bodies are interpreted and evaluated (Garland-Thomson, 1997; Mitchell & Snyder, 2013; Straniero, 2020). Within this framework, sport emerges as an ambivalent cultural space. On the one hand, sporting cultures may reinforce ableist imaginaries by reproducing ideals of skilled movement and physical competence (DePauw, 1997; DePauw & Gavron, 2005; Howe & Parker, 2012). On the other hand, sport may also become a transformative pedagogical laboratory in which these assumptions are exposed and questioned. In this sense, the performances of athletes with disabilities reveal the situated and plural character of bodily action, showing that movement is not a universal model to be reproduced but an embodied interpretation shaped by specific bodily possibilities (Goodley, 2011; Siebers, 2013).

This paper develops a theoretical analysis drawing on disability studies and critical pedagogical perspectives (Oliver, 1996; Goodley, 2011). It examines the educational implications of these tensions, suggesting that sport can be understood both as a context in which dominant representations of the body are reproduced and as a space where alternative understandings of movement and corporeality may emerge. The bodily performances of athletes with disabilities may generate embodied counter-narratives that challenge conventional images of disability and highlight the creative and interpretative nature of human movement (Purdue & Howe, 2012). If dominant representations of disability shape the ways bodies are perceived within sporting cultures, education may play a crucial role in questioning and reinterpreting these imaginaries. One of the central pedagogical challenges lies in what might be described as the liberation of the gaze on bodies and movement, understood not simply as the replacement of negative stereotypes with more positive images. Rather, it involves fostering forms of awareness and critical reflection that enable individuals to recognise and question the assumptions shaping their perception of bodily difference (hooks, 2020;2023). In this perspective, sport may be reinterpreted not only as a field in which normative ideals of the body are reproduced, but also as a pedagogical space capable of transforming the ways bodily difference is perceived, understood, and experienced.

This contribution presents the preliminary results of a study conducted with students enrolled in the Primary Education Degree Programme at the Department of Education Sciences of Roma Tre University, who are involved in a research-training project carried out as part of the Inclusive Education Laboratory (channel 5) and aimed at deconstructing stereotypes about neurodivergent people, particularly those with autism. At the beginning of the Laboratory, the students, organised into groups, are asked to provide a definition of “autism” and to describe some characteristics of people on the spectrum. The aim of this activity is to bring to light stereotypical or prejudicial narratives that may already be ingrained in trainee teachers and that derive from previous educational experiences and media content. In this sense, it is interesting to map the degree of adherence of the sample to certain rhetorical devices inherent in disability, such as pietism, supercrip or normal diversity (Vadalà, 2013), but also to interpretative models such as the biomedical model, which view disability as an individual tragedy (Oliver, 1990; Bocci, 2021), and autism from the perspective of deficits and/or lacks with respect to an almost undisputed neurotypical norm.

The process of critical analysis of established conceptual structures is initiated by the workshop facilitators through the viewing of images from mainstream films and television series, presented as case studies aimed at demonstrating how audiovisual narratives have played a fundamental role in the dissemination of an autistic extremotype (Brekhus, 2018) in the collective imaginary (Albanese, 2023), producing misrepresentation (Murray, 2008) of the condition. By sharing alternative interpretative lenses – such as those of Disability Studies (Goodley et al., 2013; Monceri, 2025) and Critical Autism Studies (Valtellina, 2020) – the training process itself can proceed, supported by audiovisual products that deal with autism in a more multifaceted and intersectional way (De Castro, 2023), introducing into the discourse identity variables that have a significant impact on the autistic experience, such as sex/gender, race, social class and sexual orientation.

We are living in a historical moment characterized by the hegemony of social control by elites who wield socio-political and, above all, economic and financial power.

Those who deviate from the standards deemed convenient and productive, in light of the logic that these same elites consider to be in their interests and in the maintenance of their hegemony, are paying the price.

Thus, in a civil society increasingly prey to a collective sense of learned helplessness, we are witnessing a structural redefinition of DEIA policies, not only in the United States, to international endorsement of genocidal actions (e.g., against the Palestinian people), to the glorification of war as a security measure to defend one's identity borders, and to the consequent arms race.

The ableist glorification of the MAGA model, exported around the world, is a derivative of the presence of Ur-Fascism, a concept developed by Umberto Eco in 1995. According to Eco, the archetypes of Ur-Fascism are: 1) cult of tradition and syncretism; 2) rejection of modernism; 3) cult of action; 4) disagreement as betrayal; 5) fear of difference; 6) individual or social frustration; 7) obsession with conspiracy theories; 8) glorification of the enemy; 9) permanent war and opposition to pacifism; 10) popular elitism and contempt for the weak; 11) cult of heroism and death; 12) machismo; 13) qualitative populism; 14) newspeak.

In order for Ur-Fascism – now embodied by MAGA supremacism in the US and nazi-fascist movements throughout Europe – to take hold, it must find fertile ground. This is generally composed of those who profit from the growth of right-wing extremism (which has always been used as an armed wing to impose a certain world order) and the most vulnerable sections of the population, who are most exposed to identity and security rhetoric and fascinated by false promises of an imminent new golden age.

The strategy of affirmation relies on the manipulation and distortion of communication, on toxic narratives that distort the truth, on the delegitimization of the opponent (the enemy), and on the discrediting of scientific knowledge and intellectual thought, which are branded as anti-popular. Noam Chomsky analyzed this phenomenon by developing the ten laws of power or the ten rules of social control and media power: 1) strategy of distraction; 2) introduce a false problem to provide a demagogic response; 3) gradualize political decisions; 4) present an unpopular decision as painful but necessary; 5) infantilize communication; 6) appeal to emotion; 7) promote widespread functional illiteracy; 8) encourage the public to be complacent with mediocrity; 9) induce guilt; 10) know individuals better than they know themselves.

Based on these premises, the results of an exploratory survey on the perception of the presence and incidence in the contexts of life (work and beyond) of the sample investigated of ableist, ur-fascist, media-social control, and pseudo-inclusive practices will be presented.

This survey is fueled by the need, as suggested by Eco, to unmask its new forms of Ur-Fascism active today in Italy and around the world.

This paper is part of a broader research project dedicated to the analysis of the representation of Italian schools in audiovisual media, an investigation conducted on "atypical" historical sources from a Visual History of Education perspective, which led to the collection and examination of over three hundred works produced from the post-war period to the present day (Caprino, 2025). Building on this repertoire, the study intends to reflect on the construction of the imaginary and the representation of "non-conforming" bodies within the school system, with reference to disability.

The analysis investigates how cinema and television have codified the presence within educational institutions of those who, due to disabilities, neurodivergences, or learning difficulties, often intersected with conditions of socio-economic marginality, are classified as "different" or "deviant." Starting from the assumption that such identities are not merely biological data but products of specific institutional disabling devices (Oliver, 2023) that tend to fragment the unity of the human into rigid categories (Gardou, 2006), the contribution explores the persistence of narratives oscillating between objectification (often of a clinical nature) and potential paths of self-determination.

In fictional works, documentaries, and “cinegiornali” (newsreels), the figures of children and adolescents with disabilities are often at the center of spectacularizing narratives, bent to the logic of stereotypes (Bocci, 2025; Schianchi, 2023) or functional to the staging of other characters (the "courageous mother," the "counter-current teacher"), relegating "difform" identities to a passive role. Other productions, outside the mainstream (such as the works of De Seta and Mangini), are instead capable of challenging this gaze, restoring subjectivity and political agency to "out of frame" bodies, while simultaneously revealing what the institution has often sought to normalize or hide.

Through the lens of Critical Disability Studies, the paper will analyze how certain film and television narratives manage to dismantle the rhetoric of deficit, acting as a "critical observatory" that reveals the dynamics of privilege and oppression within the peculiar Italian educational context, recognizing the "other" subject as an agent of desires and resistance. The objective is to offer a reflection on how audiovisual media can act both as tools for the reproduction of exclusionary practices and as laboratories for the construction of more democratic and inclusive imaginaries of school and society.

This paper critically examines the representation of disability in cinema by exploring how institutional recognition systems contribute to the consolidation of dominant narrative models. Moving beyond the identification of recurring stereotypes, the study focuses on the cultural, rhetorical, and symbolic mechanisms through which particular representations of disability are selected, legitimized, and publicly rewarded. The Academy Awards serve as a case study because of their central role in defining artistic value and amplifying specific cinematic imaginaries within the global film industry.

Methodologically, the study adopts a multidisciplinary and textual approach grounded in film analysis, drawing on film studies, disability studies, and the analysis of social communication. Film analysis is understood here as a critical practice aimed at deconstructing the cinematic text in order to understand its functioning, meaning, and technical organization, while relating these dimensions to broader semantic and social processes (Bellour, 2000; Bateman & Schmidt, 2013). This framework also engages disability as a rhetorical and cultural construct, shaped by ways of knowing, valuing, and seeing bodily difference within normative regimes of representation (Cherney, 2019).

Through this perspective, the paper argues that cinema does not merely represent disability but actively participates in producing it as alterity. Contemporary film culture has expanded the number of disability-related stories, yet this increase has not necessarily corresponded to a more inclusive or authentic participation of disabled actors and creators (Ghosh, 2022). On the contrary, dominant representations often remain shaped by ableist discourses, spectacular framings, and misrepresentational myths that convert disability into an exceptional condition to be consumed emotionally and symbolically (Kearney et al., 2019; Lopez, 2025).

Particular attention is devoted to Oscar-recognized films, which frequently exemplify these dominant paradigms. The analysis suggests that many award-winning films rely on spectacular and performative logics capable of transforming alterity into exception, pain into entertainment, and vulnerability into spectacle. In this sense, institutional recognition often appears to depend less on the capacity to portray disability in its lived complexity than on the ability to move, inspire, redeem, or morally reassure audiences. Such mechanisms reinforce disabling discourses in which acquired or embodied difference is narratively organized through drama, loss, and emotional excess rather than through ordinary, situated complexity (Botha & Harvey, 2024).

These dynamics shape not only how disability is shown, but also who is authorized to narrate it. The recurrent casting of non-disabled actors in disabled roles confirms a persistent asymmetry between represented subjects and narrative authority, while disabled performers continue to be underrepresented or framed as exceptional rather than artistically authoritative (Ghosh, 2022). In response, the paper foregrounds cinematic self-narration as a transformative practice. When disabled subjects directly participate in the construction of their own stories, representation shifts from external mediation to narrative self-determination. This shift challenges dominant regimes of recognition and opens the possibility of a more inclusive public space of storytelling, in which disability is no longer framed as spectacle but recognized as an integral dimension of human and social experience.

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among women in Italy (53,686 cases). Post-mastectomy breast reconstruction, which is also performed for psychosocial benefits, is carried out using implants in 80.6% of cases, using autologous tissue in 5.3%, while in 14.1% of cases, no reconstruction is planned. According to the 2024 Report of the National Registry of Breast Implants, among prosthetic reconstructions, 59.5% are performed at the time of tumor removal and 40.5% at a later stage. For tens of thousands of women, therefore, in the face of such profound bodily and identity-related changes, informed consent and awareness of the physical and psychological consequences of reconstructive surgery are fundamental. This article offers a reflection grounded in the experience of a self-organized group of women who, following a breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy, collectively assert their right not to undergo breast reconstruction automatically and immediately, based on the idea that the consequences and complications of reconstruction may not outweigh the aesthetic and perceptual benefits. Although the idea is widespread in the medical field that restoring a self-image closer to that prior to mastectomy can help patients recover more quickly, the availability of the option to choose not to undergo reconstruction could instead prevent medical complications (infections and scarring, reduced function reduced function of the pectoral muscle, increased risk of postoperative complications, etc.). The pressure to undergo reconstruction—often presented as the preferred option within clinical pathways—can thus be interpreted as a normalizing practice that intertwines biomedical power, gender expectations, and ableist narratives (El Kotni, Sigonneau 2023).

In this sense, the loss of characteristics culturally coded as feminine—hair, breasts, nails—places many patients on the margins of gender recognizability. This paper examines how non-reconstruction is made socially conceivable or, conversely, hindered; which discursive and institutional practices contribute to constructing the post-mastectomy body without reconstruction as a “missing” body; and how an initially individual experience can transform into a collective practice of self-determination, visibility, and activism.

Methodologically, the work reconstructs national and international activist practices, public testimonies, materials produced by the groups, the results of an internal analysis, and interviews conducted with women who have initiated collective actions for visibility. The focus is on how women narrate their confrontation with clinical and social expectations, with prosthetic imaginaries, and with the implicit demand to “become legible” again as whole female bodies.

The hypothesis is that the choice not to reconstruct does not emerge as a private or residual option, but rather as a collective practice of self-determination that challenges the obligation to make amends, undermines ableist and heteronormative standards of femininity, and expands the democratic conditions of recognition. From this perspective, these women’s activism generates not only mutual support but also political and pedagogical knowledge, as it transforms individual experience into public discourse, makes non-reconstruction conceivable as a legitimate possibility, and restores to post-mastectomy bodies the right to appear without shame, without compensation, and without normalization.

Since the dawn of cinema, cinematic representations have played a crucial role in shaping individual and collective identities and the corresponding social imaginaries. From this perspective, film images cannot be considered neutral (Hall & Du Gay, 1996), nor can the cinematic apparatus itself (Guattari, 2017). The imagery produced by cinema has, in fact, contributed since its inception to the staging of disability, participating in its definition and construction as a cultural object (Longmore, 1985; Norden, 1994; Bocci, 2005; 2012; 2014; 2025; Bocci & Domenici, 2013; Bocci & Straniero, 2020; Bocci, Straniero & Tantari, 2024; Schianchi, 2023).

An analysis of the ways in which cinema portrays disability and diversity on screen allows for a deeper understanding of the socio-psycho-cultural implications of these processes, as well as the perspectives and viewpoints of those who produce and stage these portrayals. It also allows us to examine the forms and ways in which disabled bodies are portrayed, identifying the discursive rhetorics (Vadalà, 2013) that permeate the cinematic medium.

Building on these theoretical premises and in line with previous studies (Bocci & Bonavolontà, 2020; Bocci & Tantari, in press), this paper presents the initial findings of a qualitative-quantitative study conducted as part of a broader doctoral project. The study aims to establish a critical observatory on the representation of disability and diversity on screen, through the analysis of the knowledge and perceptions expressed by a group of subjects selected as a convenience sample.

In this context, cinematic representations of disability and diversity serve as analytical tools (Lapassade, 1974; Gueli, 2018; Bocci, 2020; 2025), bringing to light the contradictions of the social system, which, through its reproductive apparatus (Illich, 2019), utilizes mainstream audiovisual media—starting with cinema but also including other media products such as television series—to reaffirm a hegemonic vision based on productive and performative standards.