Conference Program

This paper offers an interdisciplinary analysis of forms of epistemic justice in contemporary educational contexts. Drawing on the notion of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) and subsequent theoretical developments, I aim to investigate how inequalities in epistemic credibility, access to interpretative frameworks, and participation in knowledge production impact educational practices and democratic processes. The paper argues that promoting collective agency requires learning environments capable of recognizing epistemic plurality and redistributing interpretive power (Freire, 2018). Methodologically, I will employ a qualitative approach based on focus groups (Frisina, 2010) among adolescents aged 15 to 18. This methodology allows us to observe dynamics of recognition, exclusion, and negotiation of meaning, consistent with a perspective on epistemic justice oriented toward the valorization of plural voices. The empirical analysis is complemented by a theoretical-critical reflection on the role of digital environments as potentially enabling but ambivalent spaces: while they can broaden access to knowledge and support collaborative practices, they also risk reproducing epistemic hierarchies through algorithmic logics and visibility asymmetries (Fricker, 2016). My aim is to highlight that a queer and decolonial pedagogy oriented toward epistemic justice must integrate dialogical practices, critical digital skills, and participatory models, strengthening democracy as a daily educational practice and challenging current educational institutions that reproduce hierarchies of gender, race, and sexuality.

Within the framework of European educational policies, contemporary schools are formally tasked with promoting democratic citizenship, inclusion, and equal opportunities. However, they remain permeated by tensions, ambivalences, and processes that reproduce social inequalities.
Schools thus emerge as environments marked by a profound paradox: on the one hand, they present themselves as institutions grounded in democratic principles; on the other, they are historically situated spaces, traversed by normative regimes that shape bodies, identities, and possibilities for action. Simultaneously, schools are the sites where democracy is taught and learned, acknowledging that democratic values cannot merely be transmitted through instruction but must be experienced, negotiated, and co-constructed through relationships among all participants, understood as reflexive and critical actors within the educational setting, and through the mediation of the world (Freire, 2004).

Consequently, teaching practices, curriculum, discipline and institutional culture often reflect the relational dynamics of contemporary society, which Walsh (2013) characterizes as capitalist, patriarchal, Western, and Christian-centered since 1492. This perpetuates the challenge of constructing genuinely inter-relational contexts capable of ensuring recognition, participation, and legitimacy for all subjectivities.

This contribution adopts the perspective of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2002) as a set of relational dynamics permeating everyday educational practices, shaping the exercise of authority, the legitimization of knowledge, and the positioning of students and teachers. Within school contexts, these dynamics manifest through the coloniality of knowledge (Lander, 2000), being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007), and gender (Mendoza, 2023), which operate, respectively, in the curricular decisions, in the construction of implicit hierarchies of humanity and value, and in the processes regulating bodies and identities.

The study situates itself at the intersection of queer pedagogy, decolonial theory, and critical postcolonial pedagogy, in dialogue with intersectionality (Collins, 2019), presenting findings from a case study (Stake, 1998) conducted in a fourth-year class of Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO) in Andalusia. The research explores pedagogical relationships in a heterogeneous and multicultural context drawing on the written and oral material recollected from personal participant observation in classroom, focus groups with students and semi-structured interviews with curricular teachers (Spanish language, Latin, history and geography, biology, English). Particular attention is paid to the pedagogical triangle (Houssaye, 1988) ̶ knowledge, students, teachers ̶ to investigate modes of teaching, content, and processes of engagement and positioning of the subjects.

Through the Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2013) of field notes, interviews, and focus groups, and in dialogue with queer and decolonial perspectives, the study reflects on how everyday pedagogical interactions may reinforce, reproduce, or occasionally destabilize dominant regimes of gender, normativity, and legitimacy, interrogating the conditions under which pedagogy can be reconceptualized as a space for emancipation, participation, and plurality.

Adopting an intersectional (Collins 2019) and queer and decolonial (Borghi 2020) theoretical perspective, this contribution aims to analyze the representation of queer subjectivities in contemporary Italian-language children's literature, questioning its pedagogical potential within educational processes.
Children's literature is one of the cultural and mass media devices that, through the production of representations, contributes to guiding the processes of socialization and identity construction in younger people, serving both as a space for the reproduction of social norms and as a possible terrain for transformation (Barsotti 2023; Forni 2022). This contribution proposes an analysis of some case studies – picture books and graphic novels published in Italian over the last twenty years – that depict subjectivities that do not conform to gender norms, a type of production that has seen significant growth in recent years (Fierli et al. 2016; 2020; 2022). Children's literature is investigated here as a symbolic space in which dynamics of exclusion, violence, and normativity can emerge, but also as a place of political and pedagogical imagination capable of making marginalized subjectivities visible (Sciurba & Bell 2020).

Inspired by the theoretical reflections and practical proposals of Rachele Borghi (2020), studies on queer pedagogy (Mayo & Rodriguez 2019), and the pedagogical thinking of Paulo Freire (2002), which lead to the adoption of an intersectional methodological and epistemological approach (Collins 2019), this contribution – starting from the conviction that there is and should be a virtuous circle of exchange between theoretical reflections and educational practices between academic research and the school context – has a twofold objective.

The first is to read these books from a queer pedagogy perspective, not limiting the analysis to the dimension of representation alone – which would risk ‘normalizing’ queer identities and co-opting them into a system that remains de facto hetero-cisnormative (Trujillo 2015) – but by questioning these works with regard to the processes of constructing normality, in order to understand whether and how they are actually capable of queering children's literature and the processes of growing up (Britzman 1995).

The second objective is to propose tools that can be used in the debate on the processes of decolonization of school practices (hooks 2020; Muraca 2021), highlighting how some works of children's literature can contribute to integrating decolonial and gender perspectives in educational contexts, or how they can, on the contrary, reflect and reproduce a colonial and cisgender gaze.

School curricula are never neutral. The selection of texts, genres, and knowledge forms that enter the classroom is always an act of power – one that legitimizes certain ways of knowing while rendering others invisible. Drawing on the frameworks of queer pedagogy and epistemic justice, this paper argues that traditional school curricula in Italy operate as normalizing technologies that systematically marginalize non-canonical forms of cultural production and non-normative subjectivities. In doing so, they reproduce what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls epistemic injustice: a form of harm that silences subjects by denying legitimacy to their ways of knowing and narrating the world. This silencing is not accidental but structural, as bell hooks (1994) reminds us when she frames the classroom as a potential site of liberation – one that is, however, too often organized around the reproduction of dominance rather than the affirmation of plural voices.

The paper focuses on three interconnected domains that remain largely absent from official school curricula: comics and graphic novels, queer themes and identities, and alternative or non-mainstream writing addressed to adolescents. Each of these areas represents not merely a gap in literary provision, but a structural exclusion that reflects deeper epistemological assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge, aesthetically valid form, and culturally worthy content. As Apple (2004) has argued, the official curriculum encodes a particular version of cultural hegemony; what is left out is as revealing as what is included. Schirripa (2020) further situates this dynamic within the Italian context, showing how critical pedagogy must contend with institutional inertia and the persistence of conservative curricular frameworks that resist the inclusion of subaltern knowledges.

Comics and graphic novels, despite decades of scholarship attesting to their cognitive and narrative complexity (McCloud, 1993), continue to be treated as peripheral or subliterary within school reading lists. Their absence is symptomatic of a broader logocentric bias that privileges the written word in its most traditional forms. Queer themes and identities remain largely invisible in school settings, where heteronormativity functions as an unmarked default – a silent norm that shapes what can be said, read, and imagined within institutional walls. As Giroux (2024) argues, schools are not simply sites of instruction but of cultural production, where certain identities are rendered legible while others are pushed to the margins.

For queer adolescents, this exclusion is particularly crucial: it forecloses access to narratives and imaginaries through which non-normative selves might be recognized and validated (Kumashiro, 2002; Sedgwick, 1990).

Mayo (2024) further highlights how critical pedagogy must actively confront heteronormativity as a form of epistemic violence, rather than treating sexuality as a private matter exterior to the political work of education.

This paper contends that the exclusion of these forms from school curricula is not incidental but constitutive: it reproduces what Mignolo and Walsh (2018) describe as the “colonial matrix of power”, which operates through the control of knowledge and aesthetic value. Decolonizing the curriculum means, therefore, not simply adding marginalized voices to an otherwise unchanged structure, but fundamentally questioning the epistemological hierarchies that govern curricular legitimacy.

Educational institutions often function as sites of coloniality, where Eurocentric and cis-heteronormative standards dictate the boundaries of “acceptable” bodies and identities (Foucault, 1975; Mayo & Blackburn, 2019; Sánchez Sáinz, 2019). For trans* individuals belonging to racialised minorities (BPOC), the school environment becomes a complex nexus of intersectional oppressions, where they experience the dichotomy of intersectional invisibility (gender identity) and hypervisibility (racialised background) (Hennekam & Dumazert, 2023).

This contribution examines these intersections through a secondary analysis of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) LGBTIQ Survey III (2024), focusing on a weighted subsample of 23,101 trans* respondents, aged 15-30, who attended school in the EU. Within the sample, 1,118 identify as a minority based on ethnicity or migrant background, and 576 identify as a minority based on skin colour.

Drawing on the dialogue between queer pedagogy and decoloniality (Mayo & Blackburn, 2019; Sánchez Sáinz, 2019), the study utilises binary logistic regression models to investigate racialisation, specifically based on skin colour, affected and still affects trans* individuals’ school environment, while accounting for the compounding effects of region, gender identity, sexual orientation and age.

The results reveal a significant vulnerability surplus among racialised respondents. In fact, white individuals exhibit a significantly lower likelihood of actively avoiding gender expression through their physical appearance (OR=0.77; p<.05) compared to their BPOC peers. This finding suggests that the intersection of transphobia and skin-colour-based racism exerts a disciplinary pressure that forces BPOC trans* students into strategic invisibility as a survival mechanism.

Furthermore, the logistic regression on school climate confirms that being white is a protective factor, as they are less likely to experience a hostile school environment (OR = 0.79; p<.05) compared to their BPOC counterparts. While dimensions such as access to gendered spaces and direct hostility by peers and teachers appear to affect all trans* students, the general school climate and the freedom of gender expression remain deeply affected by racism due to hyper visibility.

The authors argue that these findings demonstrate a form of normativity (Foucault, 1975), biopower (Foucault, 1978), and epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), whereby the school system’s inability to accommodate intersectional identities forces BPOC trans* individuals into invisibility. To support all trans* people, institutional practices must move beyond superficial “acceptance” that does not take into consideration intersectionalities, addressing the structural racism, cisnormativity and binarism that continue to configure learning environments as sites of exclusion rather than spaces of recognition.

This contribution explores the political and epistemological implications of pedagogical observation within contemporary educational contexts, marked by global inequalities, migration, queer invibilitation and persistent colonial legacies. Starting from the premise that observation in education is never a neutral act, the paper argues that observating educational processes means participating in the costruction of what becomes visible, intelligible, and legiitimate wthin educational discourse (Freire, 1970; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970). In this sense, observation constitutes not only a methodological tool but a situated practice that must be collocated in the filed of epistemological studies, and that shapes the ways educational realities are interpreted and governed.
This reasoning can be lowered in a field of research that looks at educational institutions in which structures of power related to class, race, gender and sexuality continues to organize access to recognition, partecipation and knowledge. Can pedagogical observation, therefore, become a critical practice capable of exposing the mechanism through which educational inequalities are normalized and reporoduced? Critical pedagogical traditions have long emphasized that education and observation alike are inherently political processes, oriented by specific systems of values and forms of knowledges (Freire, 1992; Lugones, 2003). Moreover, in this framework, the paradigm of aesthetic education offers an important theorical lens: drawing on pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, aesthetic education conceives learning as an experiential and relational process in which perception interpretation and meaning-making become central dimensions of knowledge (Dewey, 1934). From this perspective, observing educational processes means cultivating and attentive and reflexive gaze capable of perceiving the symbolic, relational and affective dimension of educational experience (Cambi, 2014).
Engaging in dialogue with decolonial and queer perspectives, the paper proposes to rethink observation as a relational and reflexive practice that can contribute to forms of epistemic justice within educational contexts. Rather than reducing educational marginalization to individual deficits or measurable outcomes, this approach interprets inequalities as historically and socially produced phenomena embedded in institutional practices and symbolic structures (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970).
Pedagogical observation thus becomes a form of aesthetic and political engagement with educational reality: a practice oriented not toward the normalization of difference but making visible what resists simplification and is forced to remain marginalized and to stay underneath the dominant educational narratives. Such an approach resonates with critical and pedagogical reading of LGBTQIA+ subjectivities as a critical place for the renegotiation of social pacts, analyzing the educational curvatures of representations (understood as aesthetic devices of symbolic transmission), with attention to the processes of stigmatization, cultural memory and the tensions between visibility, normalization and desire. An aesthetic education in queer curvature, and a pedagogical observation projected to aim attention on it, can be assumed as a pedagogical practice capable of reactivating recognition and citizenship, contributing to the construction of bonds based on the plurality of experiences.