Conference Program

Contemporary cultural policies often frame intercultural competence as a measurable, individualized skill aligned with neoliberal and technocratic models of integration (Biesta, 2011). While these approaches aim to standardize inclusion, they tend to shift responsibility onto individuals and short-term projects, obscuring the structural asymmetries and epistemic injustices that shape cross-cultural encounters. As a result, interculturalism is frequently reduced to fragmented, project-based interventions rather than engaging with its broader political and institutional dimensions (Dervin, 2022; Milani, 2018).
This presentation argues that Intercultural and Transcultural Competence (ITC) should instead be understood as a dynamic, generative praxis: a relational process continually negotiated within conditions of institutional constraint and power imbalance. Drawing on the INTRACOMP project as its primary site of inquiry, the study examines how practitioners engage in the labor of “staying with tension”—specifically the friction between grassroots activism and bureaucratic survival.
Grounded in the INTRACOMP Manifesto for Cultural Democracy, the research adopts a post-qualitative, narrative methodology utilizing Story-Based Collective Enquiry. This approach foregrounds reflexivity and methodological reciprocity, resisting extractive research paradigms. Central to the theoretical framework is the concept of Transensus—an agonistic space where differing values are mutually acknowledged without forced consensus—shifting the focus from social integration toward the subjectification of the political actor.
Through the analysis of INTRACOMP’s diverse contexts—from the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, where Indigenous dance decolonizes research paradigms, to the Italian Third Sector, where cultural competence is embedded in informal community mechanisms—the paper conceptualizes the project as a “living infrastructure.” This site reveals how practitioners must navigate the "coloniality of care" to translate grassroots creativity into the quantifiable evaluation regimes required by international funding bodies.
The findings suggest that decolonial pedagogies must embrace the unfinished, processual nature of intercultural work. Rather than seeking technocratic closure, inclusive cultural practice depends on sustaining institutional fragility as a space for collective imagination. It concludes that cultural difference functions not as a problem to be managed, but as a democratic resource through which cultural democracy can be practically enacted.

Recognizing dynamism as a constitutive feature of human beings and multiplicity as a primary characteristic of contemporary identities, this paper underscores the necessity and urgency of developing research postures, practices, and competencies capable of countering single-story narratives and embracing disorientation, creativity, and cultural pluralism within the framework of a complex epistemology. Contemporary societies are traversed by separatist, assimilationist, and differential exclusion policies that generate rigid categorizations, impoverish interpretative models, and lead to social isolation and identity closure. Marked by a profound crisis of democracy—one that rejects intercultural encounters within hyper-complex societies—spaces of sociality, education, and culture increasingly appear characterized by segmentation and marginalization. These tendencies privilege orientations that celebrate homogenization among groups, lineage, and identity fixity, while fearfully rejecting mobility and cultural hybridization. This conception of identity, together with the emergency-driven representation of migration—promoting the “control of the foreigner” and reinforcing prejudice—is supported and amplified by: (a) securitarian and homogenizing rhetorics that depict migration as flows, waves, or invasions; (b) migration policies in the Italian context that implement pushbacks, blockades, expulsions, the strengthening of borders, and restrictions on family reunification and residence criteria; and (c) ethnocentric educational orientations and guidelines. Within this scenario, migrant children and adolescents, reunified and unaccompanied, represent one of the most socially vulnerable groups. The paper considers them as privileged witnesses both to the systematic violation of rights and to processes of empowerment, resilience, and the co-construction of new cultures, narratives, and visions. These processes restore depth, multidimensionality, and transnationality to migrant histories and identities, situated between forms of continuity and generative crossings. Adopting a critical pedagogical perspective, the contribution reflects on initial findings emerging from observations and interviews conducted within a participatory research project carried out at the University of Turin in collaboration with Diskolé APS and Renken ETS. The protagonists of this process are young adults who reinterpret their experiences as migrant minors through the lenses of education, culture, and civic participation. In dialogue with researchers and educators, they critically problematize their trajectories, contributing to the shared construction of knowledge, to the decolonization of minds and practices, and to the re-signification of migratory experiences within educational and social contexts.

In today’s increasingly multilingual and mobile societies, educational spaces gather individuals whose identities, languages and knowledges are shaped by complex historical and personal trajectories. Despite such heterogeneity, a monolingual paradigm (Gogolin, 2008) still prevails within many European school systems—i.e., the assumption, rooted in assimilationist, deficit-oriented and implicitly (neo)colonial ideologies, that schooling should operate through one dominant standard language. Such habitus continues to structure educational practices and the very ontology of what counts as legitimate knowledge. This contributes to the reproduction of vulnerability through forms of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), whereby knowledges associated with dominant language communities are prioritized, while the linguistic repertoires and epistemic bases of minoritized and migranticized (Dahinden 2025) communities are marginalized and misframed.

From the perspective of critical and decolonial applied linguistics (e.g., Menezes de Souza 2025), this contribution interrogates how these hierarchies operate as mechanisms of epistemic exclusion. It does so by connecting theoretical and critical considerations with a reflection on our experiences as researchers in the multilingual context of Alto Adige/Südtirol. Here, a growing number of minoritized and migranticized languages coexist alongside the three official languages (German, Italian, Ladin). The latter constitute the foundation for a strict separation into three distinct educational systems. The intersection of historical and more recent forms of multilingualism makes Alto Adige/Südtirol a particularly revealing site, as it highlights structural conditions that can crystallize inequalities. Forms of such inequalities are evident in the persistent epistemic imbalance between dominant and non-dominant languages, whereby perceived economic value and cultural desirability contribute to positioning some speakers and groups in more vulnerable positions within the educational system (Guarda, 2025; Wand, 2023).

Against this backdrop and following Causevic et al. (2020)’s invitation to show how epistemologies in conditions of vulnerability can be actively and critically (re)centered, this contribution presents insights from two research projects: an ethnographic study with families experiencing the transition from kindergarten to primary school, and a participatory action research project with primary school teachers. Both projects aim to reposition linguistically minoritized and migranticized students and families as competent knowers and speakers. Building on relational pedagogy (Gravett et al., 2021; Huzar, 2025), translanguaging (García & Li Wei, 2014), and transknowledging (Ennser‑Kananen et al., 2024), the presentation explores possibilities for (re)constructing educational and research relationships in ways that foster connection and reciprocity, and where multiple languages and knowledges can co-exist without being appropriated or hierarchized. In particular, it will exemplify the potential of an approach that, starting from the assumption of intellectual equality among all subjects (Huzar, 2025), recognizes linguistic and epistemological diversity as a resource and fosters transformative practices capable of challenging linguistic hierarchies that generate vulnerability, promoting connections based on increased solidarity and understanding (Badwan, 2022).

Skill development and language courses for migrants are often portrayed as neutral and empowering approaches that facilitate participation, employability, and social integration. In Italy, programs offering Initial Vocational Education and Training (IVET) and Italian as a second language (L2), often provided by CPIAs (in Italian, Centri Provinciali per l’Istruzione degli Adulti), are viewed as essential tools for fostering inclusion and civic recognition (Gabrielli et al., 2020). However, when analyzed through decolonial and critical pedagogical perspectives (Smith, 2012; Santos, 2014), language and vocational training emerge as ambivalent dispositifs that not only develop practical and linguistic competencies but also establish regimes of legitimacy, recognition, and conditional belonging.

This paper conceptualizes vocational education and language training as pedagogical spaces shaped by normative and epistemic orders governing access to recognition and social intelligibility. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of 33 semi-structured interviews conducted in person with adult migrant workers living in Italy as part of the SKILLS4JUSTICE Horizon Europe project. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2014), employing a hybrid deductive–inductive approach (Swain, 2018). Within this broader dataset, the paper foregrounds six narratives of migrant women, approached as situated epistemic positions (Haraway, 1988).

These narratives reflect diverse life trajectories. A young Tunisian woman, recently a mother, migrates from an economically unstable background and views language learning and employment as pathways to stability, yet finds herself confined to domestic labor. An Albanian widow with two children, after years of financial dependence within her marriage, migrates seeking autonomy but is limited to cleaning work. A young Cameroonian woman leaves her homeland with her girlfriend due to social and personal constraints, seeking to live and love freely while pursuing recognition and professional fulfillment. Additionally, three older women from Eastern Europe (Moldova and Ukraine) migrate to support transnational families and enter long-term care work.

Despite their varied backgrounds, these women’s paths predominantly converge in feminized and socially undervalued sectors of employment. This convergence should not be read as a direct outcome of IVET and L2 education, but as a pattern shaped by broader institutional and normative frameworks within which skill formation and language training may participate in aligning migrants’ trajectories with socially devalued labor niches. Findings indicate that educational and training pathways are experienced as both necessities and regulatory thresholds. Institutional norms privilege standardized linguistic performances while marginalizing plurilingual repertoires and embodied communicative practices, thereby reinforcing dominant constructions of legitimacy (Haraway, 1988).

Participants’ narratives reveal experiences of linguistic inadequacy, self-discipline, and conditional recognition. These dynamics align with Benasayag and Schmit’s (2003) analysis of the internalization of normative expectations. Rather than representing individual failures, these stories illustrate patterned processes of gendered incorporation (Itzigsohn & Giorguli-Saucedo, 2005), where legal precarity and survival imperatives constrain educational participation and occupational mobility.

By emphasizing the situated voices of migrant women, this paper contributes to decolonial debates on education, migration, and epistemic justice, highlighting how language education functions as a political and pedagogical site where recognition (Dusi, 2020), legitimacy, and exclusion are continuously structured and negotiated.

This paper analyses changes in time of educational tools meant to make young Italian students aware of their in-group colonial history, proposing that this kind of study can give relevant insights on how broader socio-psychological processes are gradually facing this difficult past. Immediately after the swift collapse of the so-called Italian colonial “Empire”, a social denial (Cohen, 2001) silenced for decades the severe crimes committed during the colonial invasions. Moreover, an enduring social myth, depicting Italians as good fellows, incapable of cruelty (“Italiani brava gente”, Del Boca, 2005), sometimes also surfacing today, heavily biased the Italian societal discourse about the colonial past. Finally, even when history scholars proved beyond doubt the occurrence of these past crimes (Labanca, 2002), a self-censorship (Bar-Tal, 2017) advised not to touch on this matter, presenting it as inconvenient or out of date. The gradual unfolding of these processes consolidated a “social amnesia” that still persists (Leone & Sarrica, 2017). In this societal frame, in the first decade of 2000s narratives on colonial crimes were finally included among manuals’ contents, although briefly and somewhat reluctantly (Leone & Mastrovito, 2010; Cajani, 2013). While other popular narratives on this period (provided by literature, movies, games, etc.) still lacked, school became the main place where young generations were made aware of their in-group past history, even in its cumbersome traits, contributing to build, share, or challenge a colonial imaginary (Gabrielli, 2015). In the context of formal education, history textbooks play the central role of highly legitimated narrative artifacts (Sakki, 2025). Today, in Italian contemporary intercultural context, history textbooks provide to the new classrooms narratives addressing both to colonizers and colonized descendants. In our study we decided to focus on the use of images that only recently received a keener attention, due to their influence on cognitive and emotional reactions of readers (Gabowitsch & Topolska, 2023). We longitudinally analyzed the images siding the narrative on Fascist colonial episodes, reviewing 21 Italian history textbooks, from 1950 to present days. Interestingly, results showed that the use of images varied in three time periods, and allowed to distinguish qualitatively different kinds of images gradually emerging. In a first period, ranging from 1950 to 1980, following an initial absence of images, geo-historical maps began to appear, and were consistently present from this period on. In a second time period, starting from the 1990s, documentary photographs - often depicting the shocking colonial violence committed by Italians - and magazine covers or newspaper front pages sided the maps. Finally, in a third time period, from the 2000s onwards, explicit Fascist propaganda images were introduced in textbooks to complement the other kinds of images. Afterwards, in-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews addressing young students, both Italian and Italian of second generation (N=20) were conducted, exploring their emotional and cognitive reactions when presented with these different kinds of images.

The following proposal presents the Spanish national project Intercomsalud as an example of culturally sensitive research grounded in participative methodologies and critical pedagogy. The project addresses structural inequalities in healthcare communication affecting migrant women in settings where linguistic, cultural and epistemic barriers often lead to exclusion and reduced quality of care (Pena Díaz, 2023; Cox & Maryns, 2021). Since the training offer regarding intercultural matters for healthcare providers is very limited in Spain (Álvaro Aranda, 2025), the Intercomsalud project proposes training methodologies addressed at providers that discuss interculturalism from a decolonial approach, attempting to eliminate unconscious bias and increase understanding when communicating with migrant patients.

Methodologically, Intercomsalud adopts an interdisciplinary and participatory design. Its initial empirical phase, that took place in 2025, involved ethnographic observation and videorecording of clinical encounters between providers, migrant patients and, when available, an interpreter/intercultural mediator. Then, a specific tool was designed to analyse intercultural competence based on the affective, cognitive and behavioural processes of healthcare providers (Chen & Starosta, 1996; Deardorff, 2015) when interacting with patients from different backgrounds. Data gathered and analysed during this phase was then used in the creation of a training course addressed at healthcare providers and aimed at improving intercultural awareness and sensitivity. The course was conceived within a critical pedagogical framework that encourages trainees to question assumptions about knowledge, authority and patient–professional relationships, fostering cultural sensitivity and the questioning of institutional routines that might increase power asymmetries. Through practical exercises, reflective practices and intercultural discussion, the goal of the course is to increase the communicative abilities of healthcare providers in an intercultural medical setting and decrease the unconscious bias regarding cultural matters. The materials will be taught in 2026 both as an online and an onsite course to healthcare staff within the Community of Madrid, in Spain, and then tested by means of qualitative surveys to determine the potential of a wider application at a national level.

The present proposal will showcase course, based on the analysis of intercultural competence of healthcare professionals, and then discuss the teaching and learning experience by means of qualitative surveys. The final goal of the Intercomsalud project is contributing to the improvement of healthcare services for migrants, fostering decolonial practices and introducing training options for healthcare providers working in intercultural contexts.