Conference Program

Gender equality remains a crucial horizon for democratic renewal, yet contemporary educational systems continue to reproduce deep gendered and racialised hierarchies. This paper explores how feminist and antiracist youth activism can function as a transformative pedagogical force for rethinking gender, citizenship, and power in education. Drawing on qualitative research with young women and LGBTQ+ activists with migratory backgrounds in contemporary Europe, the study examines how grassroots practices emerging from feminist collectives, online platforms, and community-based networks create alternative spaces of learning beyond institutional schooling.

These activist environments operate as informal pedagogies in which gender norms, racialised exclusions, and colonial legacies are critically contested through intersectional and embodied forms of knowledge production. In contrast to dominant curricula that often neutralise or marginalise feminist and queer perspectives, these practices articulate education as a site of struggle, recognition, and empowerment. Young activists challenge restrictive understandings of belonging and citizenship, exposing how gendered power is intertwined with migration regimes, socioeconomic vulnerability, and cultural othering.

The paper adopts an intersectional and decolonial lens to analyse how these learning spaces disrupt Eurocentric and patriarchal assumptions embedded in educational institutions. In line with feminist pedagogy, the findings highlight the role of storytelling, counter-narratives, collective care, and cultural production as tools for building critical consciousness and political agency. These practices not only support individual empowerment but also foster solidarities and forms of inclusive leadership that contribute to gender-just democratic imaginaries.

Particular attention is paid to how activist pedagogies confront gender norms relationally, including the negotiation of masculinity, community expectations, and institutional resistance. Rather than positioning gender equality as a formal policy goal, these experiences reveal it as an ongoing educational process grounded in lived realities and collective mobilisation.

The paper argues that integrating feminist, queer, and intersectional approaches inspired by grassroots activism into Human Rights Education and citizenship education can enhance their transformative potential. In a context of rising gender backlash, xenophobia, and democratic erosion, such pedagogical practices offer crucial insights for dismantling gender hierarchies and reimagining education as a democratic project of social justice, plural belonging, and emancipation.

Affective and sexual education represents one of the fields in which the persistence of the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2007) most clearly manifests itself within contemporary educational institutions. Despite formal references to rights, respect for differences, and the promotion of well-being, school-based dispositifs often continue to reproduce a heteronormative, binary, and Eurocentric vision of the body, the family, and citizenship, inscribing young subjectivities within normative frameworks that hierarchize desires, relationships, and forms of life.

Drawing on the dialogue between queer pedagogy and decolonial studies, this contribution critically interrogates the pedagogical genealogies of affective and sexual education in modern schooling, showing how they have historically been constructed as an integral part of the colonial project of modernity. From this perspective, the body is not merely an object of education but a political dispositif through which symbolic boundaries are produced between normality and deviance, legitimacy and marginalization, full citizenship and conditional citizenship.

The paper proposes an intersectional rereading of sexual education as a space for the production of governable subjectivities, highlighting the connections between racialization, sexuality, gender, and class within curricula and teaching practices. Through the analysis of institutional documents, educational guidelines, and teaching materials, it shows how the centrality of the heterosexual model, the nuclear family, and binary sexual difference continues to implicitly structure educational pathways, marginalizing queer, trans*, migrant, and racialized experiences.

In dialogue with critical pedagogy, public pedagogy, and the perspective of epistemic justice (Collins, 2019), the contribution explores the potential of a decolonial approach to affective and sexual education, capable of recognizing situated knowledges, embodied narratives, and youth agency as pedagogical resources. Decolonizing affective and sexual education thus entails not only expanding curricular content but radically transforming educational epistemologies, shifting the focus from the normalization of bodies to the valorization of plural desires, relationships, and forms of belonging.

The aim is to redefine affective and sexual education (hooks, 1994) as a democratic space of participation, recognition, and co-construction of plural citizenships, in which subjects can critically negotiate the power dispositifs that traverse their bodies and lives. In this sense, pedagogy is configured as a political practice of liberation, capable of challenging the colonial legacy of education and opening educational possibilities grounded in social justice, desire, and the dignity of all forms of existence.

Childhood can be understood as a permanent social structure (Qvortrup, 2004), historically and culturally situated, whose meanings are produced and transformed through discourses, practices, and institutional dispositives (Foucault, 1976; Robinson, 2013). From this perspective, childhood is not a natural state, but a discursive construction through which children’s access to knowledge is regulated and their bodies and subjectivities are governed. Within this framework, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) represents a crucial epistemic and political turning point, as it recognises children as rights-bearing subjects in the present rather than as adults-in-the-making or future citizens (Macinai, 2013; Qvortrup, 2008). As an international human rights treaty, the UNCRC is not neutral. However, in its interpretation and implementation, it contributes to the stabilisation of a normative image of childhood.

In this context, this paper highlights how the UNCRC is grounded in an exclusively age-based approach (Frödén & Quennerstedt, 2020), which has contributed to overlooking and marginalising other forms of injustice and oppression affecting children. In doing so, it reproduces the myth of the universal child (Davis & Marsh, 2022), which operates as a regulatory parameter, obscuring other forms of oppression, such as race, social class, gender, sexuality and ability.

In close continuity with this dynamic, the myth of the universal child tends to consolidate itself through the construction of childhood as innocent (Robinson, 2008, 2013). If universality abstracts childhood into an apparently neutral and homogeneous figure – one that reflects Western, white, and colonial imaginaries – innocence provides its moral foundation by constructing the child as naturally pure and in need of protection from everything related to gender and sexuality. The construct of innocence reproduces the boundaries between what is considered appropriate or inappropriate, sayable or unsayable, educable or dangerous for children. Precisely because it presents itself as an unquestionable moral truth, innocence operates as a regulatory technology that desexualises childhood and contributes to the production of the normative adult citizen-subject through early processes of heteronormalisation (Robinson, 2008, 2013; Colli Vignarelli, 2025).

In this sense, universality and innocence are conceptualised as technologies of childhood governance that render childhoods deviating from these norms less intelligible and legitimate. Therefore, adopting a queer and decolonial perspective could contribute to the deconstruction of the binary and heteronormative norms that regulate bodies and subjectivities from early childhood, while challenging the homogenising universalism that obscures historical, cultural and material differences. This approach can critically subvert and re-signify children’s rights and the very idea of childhood, thereby opening space for the plural recognition and epistemic legitimisation of all childhoods.

Across Europe, renewed nationalist discourses and authoritarian turns have intensified struggles over collective memory, belonging, and the meaning of the nation. Schools are central to these struggles. While formally tasked with promoting democratic values and inclusion, they remain key sites where normative conceptions of national identity are reproduced through curricula, pedagogical practices, and everyday interactions. This presentation examines how racialised Italianness is produced, sustained, and contested at the intersection of history and civic education in upper-secondary schools, contributing to the decolonisation of dominant narratives of personhood and citizenship by challenging the construction of “othered” individuals as external to Italianness and foregrounding their constitutive role in its historical formation.

In Italy, individuals racialised as the “Other” continue to encounter exclusionary discourses shaping how citizenship and belonging are imagined and regulated across civic, political, and educational spaces. Since the 1990s, intercultural education policies have sought to address growing ethnic and racial diversity. Yet these interventions largely frame diversity as a problem to be managed, reproducing an implicit “we/Other” epistemic position (Burgio & Vaccaro, 2023) rather than interrogating the foundations of Italianness. National identity thus appears coherent, morally unified, and implicitly white, while racialised difference is constructed as external to the national body.

The literature shows how Italianness has been constituted through whiteness and Catholicism, and the myth of “Italians, good people” - a discourse of self-ascribed moral exceptionalism that legitimised colonial expansion and sedimented narratives of national innocence across Fascism and the post-war Republic (Del Boca, 2005; Giuliani & Lombardi-Diop, 2013). Yet these perspectives have only partially informed research and practice in history and civic education.

Rather than treating these subjects as neutral, the research conceptualises them as epistemic sites where authoritative narratives of the past intersect with normative prescriptions of civic virtue, shaping the present and producing racial hierarchies of belonging. Drawing on Foucauldian understandings of discourse (Bacchi & Bonham, 2014; Foucault, 1972), assemblage thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), and Hall’s (2017) conceptualisation of race as a floating signifier, Italianness is approached as a contingent and unstable formation continuously rearticulated through educational knowledge and practice.

The study combines critical discourse analysis of national curricula with ethnographic fieldwork in upper-secondary schools in Turin. Particular attention is paid to students positioned as “standard” or “unmarked” Italians to examine how normative whiteness is reproduced through seemingly neutral teaching practices. Teachers’ interviews and participatory workshops reveal how colonial histories are marginalised, racial continuities disavowed, and emotional tensions emerge when dominant narratives and language are unsettled.

Initial findings suggest that race operates as a structuring yet marginalised dimension of educational discourse, generating epistemic injustice that renders certain histories and racialised subjectivities peripheral. At the same time, moments of ambiguity and contestation expose the instability of these regimes of truth and point to the pedagogical possibility of decolonising national narratives. By interrogating how Italianness is normalised and whitened in schooling, the study contributes to debates on epistemic justice in postcolonial Italy and reflects on the potential of critical pedagogy to unsettle racialised common sense within education.

Contemporary discussions on democratic education emphasize classroom practices that foster dialogue and active participation in shared processes. From the perspective of critical pedagogy, education is understood not merely as the trasmission of knowledge, but as a social and political practice through which learners engage with questions of power, representation, and justice (Freire, 1970; hooks, 2014; Giroux, 2020). In English Language Teaching (ELT), literary texts frequently serve as sites where cultural knowledge is introduced and negotiated. Yet classroom materials often reproduce normative representations of gender, family, and identity. While research on critical and inclusive language pedagogy has expanded, sexuality and gender continue to be marginalized in primary education. As a result, heteronormative assumptions continue to shape what counts as legitimate cultural knowledge and whose experiences become visible within classroom discussions.

This contribution presents findings from a qualitative classroom intervention conducted in two fifth-grade English classes in Norway, involving thirty puoils. The intervention explored how queer children's literature and arts-based literacy practices might support more inclusive and participatory forms of classroom dialogue. The teachng sequence centered on the graphic novel series The Tea Dragon Society (O'Neill, 2017, 2019, 2021, which portrays a fictional community characterized by diverse identities, abilities, and relational practices. Through shared reading, discussions, and creative responses, pupils engaged with the narrative by producing drawings, poems, and sculptures that interpreted the characters, their relationships, and stories. The dataset includes recordings of classroom discussions, photographs and scans of student artwork, field notes, and short interviews with five participants.

Drawing on queer pedagogy and intersectional perspectives on knowledge and power (Crenshaw, 1989), the study approaches literary engagement as a potential site of epistemic justice in language education. From a decolonial perspective, queering classroom texts and interpretive practices can disrupt dominant knowledge hierarchies that privilege normative narratives of identity, belonging, and social relations, opening space for alternative ways of understanding community and difference. Such an approach resonates with broader conceptions of democratic education that emphasize encounters with plurality within shared educational spaces (Biesta, 2020). The analysis show that arts-based literacy activities can create interpretative spaces in which the pupils collaboratively explored the subject and engaged with the narrative. Multimodal responses provided multiple entry points into literary engagement and language use.

Arts-based literacy activities created interpretative spaces in which pupils collaboratively explored and engaged with the narrative. Multimodal responses supported participation by allowing them to interpret and articulate their opinions through different expressive forms. Integrating queer children's literature and arts-based literacy practices functions as an epistemic intervention in primary ELT, enabling pupils to engage with diverse perspectives, supporting a more plural and democratic form of classroom knowledge-making. More broadly, the study demostrates how everyday literacy practices in primary ELT can contribute to epistemic justice by expanding whose experiences and perspectives are recognized within classroom dialogue.

This contribution is based primarily on an awareness of its own positioning about decolonial and intersectional theories. Unlike the conventional goal of reaching some sort of normative judgment, the present document analysis we propose is aimed at exploring how texts shape the epistemological and democratic potential of education. We are aware of the need to clarify the distinction between the levels of institutional documents and the level of decolonial theories. The research starts from an exploration of the conditions under which such decolonization would be conceivable, instead of beginning with the assumption that decolonization is not possible or that it has potentially already been achieved. The preliminary premise of this research is that, while the Italian ministerial guidelines use inclusive and pluralistic language in formulating the curriculum, there may be implicit epistemic hierarchies that do not really allow for a structural reconfiguration of the curriculum in decolonial terms. The research explores how the Italian ministerial guidelines configure a decolonial reconfiguration of the curriculum and under what epistemic conditions it is conceivable. The analysis takes an exploratory approach. It seeks to identify the ways in which the school curriculum develops through its discursive and epistemic frameworks. The aim is to determine how these frameworks support or hinder the possibility of rethinking educational practice, including school curricula, in a direction oriented towards emancipation and the enhancement of diversity. The research question is as follows:

What are the democratic knowledge and perspectives shaped by the Italian ministerial guidelines, and how do they help or hinder a decolonial reconceptualisation of educational practice?

Although the analysis does not intend to engage in an evaluation of the political will of the ministerial guidelines, the aim is to identify the particularities of certain discursive configurations and their impact on the epistemic boundaries through which democratic education is imagined.

Documents considered for research purposes:

• La via italiana per la scuola interculturale e l’integrazione degli alunni stranieri [‘‘The Italian way to intercultural schooling and the integration of foreign students’’], 2007

• Linee guida per l’accoglienza e l’integrazione degli alunni stranieri [‘‘Guidelines for the reception and integration of foreign students’’], 2014

• Diversi da chi? Raccomandazioni per l’integrazione degli alunni con cittadinanza non italiana [‘‘Different from whom? Recommendations for the integration of students with non-Italian citizenship’’], 2015

• Orientamenti interculturali. Idee e proposte per l’integrazione di alunne e alunni provenienti da contesti migratori [‘‘Intercultural guidelines: Ideas and proposals for the integration of students from migratory backgrounds’’], 2022

A preliminary document analysis suggests that the Italian ministerial guidelines use inclusive and democratic language, but do not really question colonial epistemic hierarchies. The ministerial guidelines formally recognise diversity but do not go beyond a knowledge framework that underpins the school curriculum and intercultural guidelines, which does not allow for an effectively decolonial approach. At the same time, although decolonial pedagogy is never explicitly mentioned, these institutional documents highlight certain conditions that could facilitate a dialogue from a decolonial perspective, such as the critique of ethnocentrism and assimilationism and the appreciation of culture and language.