Conference Program

The complexity of contemporary socio-political challenges requires a rethinking of the hermeneutic models that convey the education-democracy binomial. This paper analyzes the ethical models that characterize two narrative paradigms of popular comic culture: the lone Superman icon and the institutional ecosystem depicted in My Hero Academia. The primary objective is to compare the axiological foundations of the values embodied by the respective heroic figures to reveal two distinct epistemic perspectives on democracy and its pedagogical implications in Civic Education. The research will be conducted through a comparative qualitative analysis of narrative content, applying a cultural critique lens to the selected texts. The thematic analysis method will be used to identify and codify ethical frameworks and action patterns. Superman will be decoded as a transcendent ethical archetype (Vogler, 2020), with specific reference to the philosophy of otherness (Levinas, Hayat & Ragazzoni, 2006) and the existentialist thought of hope (Palmitessa, 2017). My Hero Academia will, in contrast, be analysed as an expression of collective consciousness and Durkheim's structural functionalism, with particular emphasis on Merton's theory of deviance to examine the systemic criticalities of society. The investigation aims, in conclusion, to define the didactic and value implications carried out through an artifact outside the circuits of formal education and to highlight whether democratic learning should be anchored to universal and stable ideals (Superman) or to a reflective and contextual understanding of the dynamics of current reality (Horikoshi's manga), thus providing analytical tools for the formation of a conscious citizenship.

Drawing on The Intelligent Movement, this paper frames breaking as an embodied educational ecology grounded in cultural incorporation. Movement becomes a site where perception, cognition, and relationality co-emerge, reshaping subjectivity and collective formation. Hip hop dance reconfigures how bodies inhabit space, offering transformative pedagogical possibilities within contexts marked by social inequality.

While the French rap scene was significantly shaped by the voices of young people with migrant backgrounds from the banlieues since its origin in the 1980s (Hammou, 2012), postcolonial identities and imaginaries in the Italian “rap game” have gained cultural and commercial relevance only in the past decade (Ardizzoni, 2020; Calò, 2012). Today, the multivocal mosaic of postcolonial rap challenges the often patronizing and criminalizing media and political narratives surrounding post/migrant youth from working-class or underclass backgrounds in the Italian suburbs through its own codes (Fabbro, 2025; Saitta, 2023; Sarti, 2025). Recent statistics indicate that these youths represent the most socially and educationally disadvantaged group in the Italian education system (INAAP, 2021; INVALSI, 2025; MIM, 2024). This situation underscores that even pedagogic discourse (Bernstein, 2000) in Italy is not exempt from power asymmetries, especially along the lines of class and ethnicity (Arena, 2025; Hakuzwimana, 2024). Schools thus emerge not only as sites of instruction, but also as spaces where recognition, misrecognition, and symbolic exclusion are produced and contested.

This research draws upon decolonial revisitations of Bernstein’s concept of pedagogic discourse (or device) (Hlatshwayo, 2024; Parada & Whatman, 2025) to examine educational disadvantage by looking at how young post/migrant artists (e.g. Baby Gang, Chadia, Ghali, Lorenzza) rap about their formal and informal education experiences. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis (Rogers, 2018), this study analyzes a targeted sample of rap songs and corresponding music videos to explore how educational experiences are represented and which pedagogic discourses are contested, negotiated, or upheld. By mobilizing a decolonial lens, rap lyrics and music videos are approached as sites of knowledge production, where schooling, street education, family socialization and racialized surveillance intersect. Finally, findings are discussed to provide some epistemological insights into the challenges face by Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy (Adjapong & Allen, 2024; Edmin, 2016). By foregrounding the voices of post/migrant rappers, the article reflects on the possibilities and limits of incorporating subaltern cultural knowledge into formal education, asking whether and how rap can function not only as a pedagogical tool, but also as a critique of the pedagogic device itself.

The objective of this paper is to critically discuss the impact and potential of a research-teaching project that places comics and visual storytelling at the core of a creative and participatory inquiry on girls’ perceptions of urban safety and the gendered livability of the city. The project was carried out with a group of graduate students in social work and was designed as a research-teaching initiative combining scientific research, academic teaching, and community engagement (Pellegrino 2018; Tarsia 2020). Within this framework, creative methods—and comics in particular—are conceived not merely as dissemination tools, but as methodological and pedagogical infrastructures that enable participation, reflexivity, and accessibility.

The project Che genere di città? - developed within the standing group ParTeR (Participatory Teaching & Research, University of Parma) - emerged as a deliberately non-securitarian response to student representatives’ claims for increased “security” in the city and on campus, particularly for women and girls. Rather than reinforcing dominant securitization discourses, the project aimed to challenge mainstream gender models and promote a culture of equality and non-violence. Drawing on feminist and critical literature on gender and urban space (Andreola & Muzzonigro 2024; Kern 2021; Valentine 1989, 1990), the project involved 104 students as both participants and co-researchers in six-month research and learning process. Activities included one creative workshop, 46 in-depth interviews, three art-based focus groups, and two collaborative art-based workshops conducted in close collaboration with a professional cartoonist.

Building on Giorgi et al. (2021), who highlight the use of creative methods across different stages of the research process, this paper focuses specifically on the pedagogical and participatory value of comics and illustration within research-teaching practices. First, it discusses how a creative workshop involving drawing, coloring, maps, and stickers was used as a didactic tool to collectively design the qualitative interview outlines.Second, it examines how the collaborative transformation of narrative interview data into comics functioned as a situated teaching and learning strategy for qualitative data analysis. Rather than treating comics as a mere visual translation of research findings, the process of co-creating illustrated narratives with a cartoonist was designed as a pedagogical device through which students were required to actively engage with core analytical practices, such as data selection, coding, abstraction, and interpretation.

In order to translate interview excerpts into visual sequences, students had to collectively decide which narratives, meanings, and emotions were analytically relevant, how to condense complex accounts into scenes, and how to represent power relations, spatial dynamics, and gendered experiences of safety through visual metaphors. This process made interpretative choices explicit, discussable, and contestable, thus fostering reflexivity and methodological awareness.

At the same time, the comics format enabled forms of participatory validation, as the visual narratives were shared and discussed with research participants, opening up a dialogical space in which interpretations could be confirmed, negotiated, or challenged. In this sense, comics operated simultaneously as a learning environment, an analytical tool, and a participatory research device, reinforcing the interconnection between teaching, research, and community engagement.

This paper explores the potential of graphic novels for culturally reflective, mediation-oriented education in the contexts of migration, identity negotiation and democratic participation. Focusing on Italiana, con permesso (Ben Mohamed, 2025), it analyses the portrayal of the author's experiences of migration, multilingualism, religious affiliation and social positioning in Italy. The protagonist's story illustrates how issues of belonging, cultural identity and social participation are negotiated within migrant communities. The study also investigates how visual narratives can engage learners with experiences of migration and plural identities.

Assuming that narrative and visual representations can make complex social realities more accessible, this paper presents how graphic novels can serve as educational resources that promote global citizenship and reflection on democratic values and social participation in Italian language classes for foreign learners (Zadra & Bartoli-Kucher, 2023). Visual narratives empower learners to critically engage with diverse perspectives on migration and social belonging (Spadaro, 2020).

The theoretical framework integrates culturally reflective learning and the mediation concept of the CEFR Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2020), which emphasises linguistic, social, and cultural mediation within multilingual societies. Global citizenship education offers a perspective through which to critically consider social diversity, migration experiences and democratic participation (UNESCO, 2014; Zadra & Bartoli-Kucher, 2023).

Using selected scenes from Italiana, con permesso, this paper demonstrates how belonging, discrimination, identity negotiations, and social expectations are visually and narratively presented. This highlights the potential for critical, reflective, dialogical, and mediation-oriented learning processes (Bartoli-Kucher, 2025). Therefore, graphic novels can be used as educational resources to foster democratic values, social responsibility and active citizenship in foreign language teaching.

“History dissolves into images, not into stories,” Walter Benjamin (1983, 596) writes in the Passagen-Werk — a formulation that helps explain why our remembrance of the Holocaust is so powerfully visual. These visual representations appear as photographs, films and, increasingly, as comics. Long viewed with skepticism as an inadequate mode for representing the Holocaust, the comic today nonetheless offers distinctive affordances and poses characteristic risks (Grünewald 2014; Frenzel, 2014; Merten 2021).

This contribution explores the possibilities and pitfalls of depicting the Holocaust through comics, arguing that they can encourage critical reflection rather than documentary literalism. Their multimodal grammar — sequential panels, juxtaposed image and text, deliberate omission — can generate concrete yet pluralistic images that resist the abstraction of universal remembrance while simultaneously pointing to their constructed nature. (Frahm 2006). This duality enables comics to bring to light the perspectives of marginalized victims, to interrupt perpetrator-centered gazes that prevails in historic photography with few exceptions (e.g. Didi-Huberman 2012), to juxtapose past and present, and to invite readerly reflection through deliberate artifice. At the same time, comics carry specific hazards: they can simplify causalities, aestheticize suffering, instrumentalize survivor testimony for broader moralizing narratives, or reproduce voyeuristic framings that occlude complexity (Köppen/Scherpe 1997). They have the potential to reproduce harmful visual tropes that resonate with antisemitic and dehumanizing iconography, and the creation of retrospective narratives that impose spurious causal coherence onto acts whose brutality and irrationality resist explanation (McLaughlin 2021; Brink 1998).

The considerations are based on debates about photography that have shaped our view of the Holocaust and are conducted mainly from the perspective of the perpetrators or liberators, trapping the people who suffered during the Holocaust in the position of victims, e.g. in photo collections such as The Yellow Star (Schoenberner 1978) and on pictures drawn by prisoners, which reflect the perspective of the survivors but are mostly neglected in the debate because they are accused of lacking objectivity. The contribution develops four analytical categories – (1) perspective, (2) authenticity, (3) ‘the unthinkable’ and (4) narrative – and applies them to four selected works: MAUS, Yossel, Auschwitz and Der Boxer (Spiegelman 1986/1991; Kubert 2003; Croci 2005; Kleist 2012). The contribution examines how comics can shed light on (historical) epistemic injustice and on the role of Holocaust victims as witnesses, which is central for epistemic agency (Fricker 2007): What perspectives do comics enable or interrupt, how do they signal constructedness as opposed to documentary claims, and how can they bring neglected victim groups to the fore? The contribution concludes with concise, practice-oriented implications for historical-political education: selection criteria, contextualization imperatives and ethical guardrails to leverage comics’ pedagogical strengths while minimizing aestheticization and instrumentalization.

Graphic medicine (GM) has emerged as an interdisciplinary field integrating comics, visual storytelling, and healthcare, offering innovative tools for medical education and reflective practice. Despite growing interest, there is still limited qualitative research examining how GM is experienced by medical students across different cultural and institutional contexts. This study explores and compares students’ experiences with graphic medicine at the University of Bologna (Italy) and at the Universidad de Valparaíso (Chile).

A qualitative research design based on semi-structured interviews was adopted. Participants included medical students (10) from different years of training who had taken part in graphic medicine and narrative medicine courses, laboratories, or extracurricular projects in the two universities. Interviews were conducted in Spanish and Italian, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using thematic analysis. Analytical focus was placed on participants’ prior relationships with drawing and visual arts, their experiences of graphic medicine as a learning environment and the role of drawing and comics in emotional expression and reflection.

Across both contexts, GM was described as a distinct educational space characterized by openness, safety, and collective reflection, in contrast to traditional biomedical training. Participants reported increased awareness of the ethical and communicative dimensions of clinical practice, particularly regarding the weight of medical language, gestures, and attitudes. Participants also highlighted structural and institutional challenges, including the elective status of GM courses and the difficulty of integrating reflective, non-assessed practices within highly standardized and performance-oriented medical curricula. In this sense, GM operated as a redistributive epistemic practice, giving voice to students' situated knowledge and enabling counter-narratives to the techno-scientific authority that structures medical training

The comparative findings from Chile and Italy indicate that integrating GM into medical curricula may help bridge the gap between technical-scientific training and the humanistic dimensions of care, promoting more empathetic, reflective, and socially aware future physicians.