Conference Program

This paper examines school architecture as a constitutive yet often neglected dimension of democratic education. Drawing on intersectional and decolonial approaches, it explores how the spatial and material conditions of school buildings shape everyday educational practices and contribute to the reproduction or reduction of social, environmental, and epistemic inequalities. While debates on democratic schooling frequently emphasize curricula, participation, and governance, the built environments in which education takes place remain under-theorized, despite their profound impact on embodied experience, well-being, and educational access (Soja, 2010).

The paper is grounded in empirical field research conducted primarily in public schools in Austria. It shows that many recently constructed school buildings—widely celebrated as innovative—are already struggling with the effects of climate change. Students, teachers, and school staff report insufficient shading, inadequate natural ventilation, limited passive cooling strategies, and severe overheating during summer months. These conditions restrict pedagogical practices and disproportionately affect those who spend long hours in educational spaces, raising questions of environmental injustice and unequal exposure (Young, 1990).

From a decolonial perspective, the paper argues that dominant Central European school architecture relies on technocratic, energy-intensive design paradigms that privilege abstract efficiency over lived experience and situated climatic knowledge. Such paradigms reflect colonial continuities in architectural thought, positioning Eurocentric traditions as universal while marginalizing other ways of knowing and building (Mignolo, 2011). Black decolonial scholarship emphasizes that space is a key site through which colonial power operates: Fanon (1963) analyzes colonial spatial ordering, while Mbembe (2001) shows how built environments discipline bodies and structure educational life.

The paper foregrounds African-based architectural knowledge as theory rather than a field of application. Architects and scholars such as Francis Kéré, whose school buildings in Burkina Faso exemplify climate-adaptive, community-based design (Kéré, 2017), and AbdouMaliq Simone, whose work highlights everyday spatial practices and collective life in African cities (Simone, 2004), demonstrate how architecture emerges from local material ecologies, social relations, and pedagogical needs. Clay construction, widely used in African schools, enables passive thermal regulation, minimizes mechanical cooling, and draws on intergenerational knowledge systems. As Nnamdi Elleh (1997) argues, African architecture must be understood through its cultural, climatic, and social specificities rather than Eurocentric evaluative frameworks.

The marginalization of such knowledge in Central European school construction is not merely technical but epistemic. Dominant approaches to materiality and environment remain entangled with racialized histories of knowledge production (Yusoff, 2018; Wynter, 2003). Re-centering African architectural practices is thus both a matter of epistemic justice and environmental sustainability.

Methodologically, the study combines qualitative case studies of schools built with sustainable materials in African contexts with interviews with students, teachers, school staff, and local architects. Drawing on dialogical pedagogical traditions (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994), it rejects extractive comparison, framing transnational learning as reciprocal and situated.

In line with the Scuola Democratica conference, the paper argues that climate-resilient and socially just school architecture is a prerequisite for democratic education. It concludes that centering African-based architectural knowledge is essential for reimagining educational spaces that foster participation, inclusion, and equality in a warming world.

The contribution aims to outline the socio-political commitment of Angela Maria Guidi Cingolani (31/10/1896 – 11/07/1991, Rome), the first woman in the Italian Republic to hold a government position.

She received her early formation within the women’s associations of Catholic Action; her encounter with Luigi Sturzo was decisive, as he involved her in the Organization for Civil and Religious Assistance to War Orphans and encouraged her to join the Italian People’s Party in 1919, where she assumed the position of secretary of the Roman women’s group until the party’s dissolution by the Fascist regime in 1926.

In 1921, she founded the National Committee for Women’s Labour and Cooperation, serving as its secretary until 1926. In 1925, she passed the competitive exam to become a Labour Inspector. Throughout the Fascist period, she continued to devote herself to women’s work and, together with her husband Mario Cingolani – a prominent figure in Catholic Action and later a deputy to the Constituent Assembly – she took part in the clandestine network of the Christian Democracy, of which she was a national councillor from 1944 to 1947. In the post-war period, she joined the party’s national leadership as well as the central committee of the women’s movement.

In 1945, as a member of the National Council (Consulta Nazionale), her voice as a woman was the first in history to resonate in Montecitorio. She was elected in 1946 to the Constituent Assembly of Italy and, in 1948, became a deputy in the first republican legislature, devoting particular attention to the debate on the law for the protection of working mothers. She was among the founders of the Italian Committee for the Moral and Social Defence of Women in 1950 and served as Undersecretary for Crafts at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce from 1951 to 1953.

This paper examines the work of female teachers in a rural school in Vicenza during the Fascist period in Italy (1922–1943). Specifically, it explores women’s teaching labor within a context of intense political and symbolic discipline as an ambivalent space between subordination and agency. The study conceptualizes the teacher as a figure situated at the intersection of gender, professional identity, rural context, and institutional constraint, adopting a historical-critical perspective and engaging with gender pedagogy. Furthermore, it interrogates whether and to what extent women’s educational work functioned not only as a mechanism of ideological reproduction, but also as a site of professional self-definition and emancipation.

Drawing on the analysis of school registers, classroom reports, and personal files preserved in the school’s historical archive, the research reconstructs several professional trajectories, highlighting how women’s educational work simultaneously functioned as an instrument of the regime’s ideological project and as a daily practice of care, mediation, and civic responsibility. The sources reveal the material and symbolic conditions shaping teaching practices, including moral surveillance, political expectations, limited resources, and the naturalization of women’s pedagogical roles.

Within a highly hierarchical structure shaped by authoritarian control, female teachers developed differentiated strategies of adherence, adaptation, negotiation, and subtle resistance in response to imposed norms. Primary schooling thus emerges as a site of tension: a space where disciplined models of femininity and political directives were reproduced, but also one in which professional competences were exercised and meaningful educational relationships were formed. Through everyday classroom practices, interactions with families, and the management of local social dynamics, these teachers contributed to processes of literacy, socialization, and community cohesion that extended beyond the regime’s ideological objectives.

From this perspective, women’s teaching can be interpreted as a form of professional care work - often undervalued and institutionally marginalized - yet capable of producing long-term social effects. Even within an authoritarian system, such labor generated processes of professional autonomy and forms of civic engagement that later constituted important preconditions for democratic citizenship. By analysing the epistemic dimension of women’s educational role, the paper aims to restore visibility to women historically overlooked in official narratives. Furthermore, it contributes to broader debates on women’s work, agency, and the complex and ambivalent paths toward emancipation.

The feminisation of the teaching profession in Brazil cannot be separated from the processes of symbolic and material devaluation that have historically marked educational labour. The widespread figure of the tia (“aunt/auntie”), especially in primary schooling, has helped to naturalise teaching as an extension of care labour, weakening its professional standing and obscuring its epistemic and politico-pedagogical responsibility. This paper offers a theoretical rereading of Paulo Freire’s Professora sim, tia não: Cartas a quem ousa ensinar (1993), placing it in dialogue with scholarship on the feminisation of the magistério and with recent analyses of teacher-education policy in Brazil.

For analytical purposes, the argument distinguishes three ways of interpreting feminised teaching work: first, a vocational naturalisation that assimilates teaching to a maternal disposition; second, a technico-corporate professionalisation oriented towards institutional recognition yet not necessarily attuned to the political character of education; and third, a political-epistemic valorisation which, in Freire, takes the form of de-naturalising and de-familiarising the teaching role. The latter does not entail the ideologisation of schooling. Rather, it rests on an explicit acknowledgement of education’s non-neutrality and of the school’s formative function in shaping historical and critical subjects.

What Freire articulates within his specific context may serve, in light of subsequent developments in critical pedagogy, as a theoretical framework for reconsidering the public and epistemic dimensions of teaching more broadly.

Such a shift in perspective requires a reconstruction of teacher authority as a democratic practice grounded in intellectual discipline, continuing formation, and coherence between theory and practice. Politicisation, here not synonymous with partisan militancy, names the assumption of the ethical and public responsibility inherent in every educational act. In this sense, it restores to teaching the status of situated knowledge production and civic formation, resisting both the sentimental moralisation of care and the reduction of teaching to technical delivery.

The paper also briefly considers the normative transformations that have affected teacher education and curriculum regulation in Brazil over recent decades, asking to what extent these developments enable or constrain a reconfiguration of teaching work consistent with Freire’s horizon. Without offering a comprehensive policy review, it highlights how professional recognition remains entangled with gendered dynamics and with the epistemic definition of teachers’ roles within schooling institutions.

The paper concludes that the emancipatory potential of a predominantly female teaching body lies in its political-epistemic reconfiguration as a democratic practice capable of generating professional agency, critical authority, and informed participation in public life.

Any reflection on women’s empowerment that leaves aside the issue of control over economic resources risks overlooking one of the most subtle and difficult to recognize forms: domestic economic violence. Money in this view becomes a symbol, which amplifies its instrumental function, taking the form of a power device that prevents the achievement of self-determination. "There can be no female empowerment without financial autonomy" (Granata 2024.) In our country, one-third of women do not have a personal current account, this prevents them from fully developing empowerment and often leads them to assume a position of subordination towards their husbands or partners. It is within the family as a safe place that domestic economic violence occurs. In the international legal framework, UN Women defines domestic violence as a pattern of abusive conduct within a family relationship, the man prevents the woman from using and managing the financial resources of the household. The goal is to make women weak and economically unstable, by exercising decision-making power over consumer choices, also establishing what can be bought and what must be denied, forcing her partner to ask him for money even for small daily expenses and refusing to contribute to the costs necessary for family subsistence. According to the World Bank’s report, Women, Business and the Law 2022, more than 30 countries do not yet have laws that limit or punish such violence. The regions where there are more cases are: Abruzzo, Apulia, Tuscany, Veneto, Valle D'Aosta and Sicily, a constant data is the economic vulnerability (Rinaldi 2023) of women who suffer violence, only 37% say they have a stable income from work or retirement. This data highlights how economic vulnerability can affect the possibility of escaping violent relationships and to undertake paths of autonomy. Of the total number of women who have turned to an anti-violence center instead, (Rinaldi 2023) 37% said they were subjected to economic violence, so more than one woman in three, and also in 91% of cases the perpetrator is a man with whom the victim has or has had a significant relationship, so it is rare that this happens at the hands of a stranger. In summary, the contribution is part of the pedagogical debate on power dynamics within family contexts, considering domestic economic violence as a formative issue. In this, we intend to analyze how financial literacy can be configured as an economic empowerment tool, which is not limited only to the transmission of technical knowledge, but is proposed as an emancipative educational device (Lopez 2025) which activates individual capacities and strengthens decision-making autonomy by increasing agency possibilities, also allows women to manage economic resources independently, countering risks of abuse, and supporting the possibility of making own decisions and actively participating in social life.

This proposal offers a reflection focused on the role of educational prevention as a fundamental strategy of equality education in reducing gender-based violence, with particular attention to university students and young adults. It places the intervention in the context of higher education as a crucial setting in which intimate relationships, emotional expectations and gender norms are actively constructed and renegotiated. In this perspective, prevention is conceived not only as risk reduction but as a formative process aimed at promoting relational awareness and responsibility among university students in their present and future intimate relationships.

In its most invisible forms, gender-based violence compromises the possibility of building healthy and respectful intimate relationships, normalising power asymmetries and emotional control in everyday interactions. Universities, as transitional environments where young adults develop their identity, autonomy and emotional skills, are strategic contexts for implementing prevention and empowerment programmes.

In this perspective, relationship education becomes essential for recognising early warning signs of violence, questioning harmful norms and preventing the normalisation of violence. It provides students with tools to critically examine relational expectations, power imbalances and implicit gendered assumptions that may shape their intimate interactions. By fostering reflexivity and mutual responsibility, relationship education supports the development of relational patterns grounded in respect, reciprocity and care.

Alongside this theoretical framework, the proposal discusses preliminary results from an educational intervention addressed to a university student population, aiming to support prevention and empowerment in the domain of intimate relationships. The quasi-experimental research design included a pre–post survey and adopted a mixed-methods approach to explore perceptions, gender stereotypes, myths about violence, and dynamics of affective dependence. These dimensions are examined as relational mechanisms that shape what students recognise as acceptable within intimacy, influencing their capacity to name coercion, set boundaries, and take responsible action when problematic dynamics emerge.

Elsa Conci (Trento 1895-1965) was one of 21 women who took part in the Constituent Assembly on 2 June 1946. Elected to the Italian Parliament in 1948 as a member of the Christian Democracy party, she remained there until her death.

She was secretary of the Christian Democracy parliamentary group from 1952 to 1965 and a member of the party leadership. From 1948 to 1965, she presented 75 bills in Parliament, 24 of which became law, delivered 70 speeches, and participated in numerous parliamentary committees. All this parliamentary activity shows that her interests were mainly focused on women, regional autonomy in Trentino, refugees, schools, and teachers. From 1954 to 1964, she was the national delegate of the Christian Democratic Women's Movement. A passionate supporter of the European ideal, in 1955 Elsa Conci was one of the founders of the European Women's Union, promoting the entry of Christian Democrat women into a European body, and in 1959 she was elected President of the Union in Berlin, a position she held until 1963. She was a member of the Italian delegation to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Immediately after 1946, the aim was to combat the negative stereotype of women in politics, "a model constructed over decades through rhetoric that had made ridicule its register and, with cartoons, caricatures and so on, had shaped an ambiguous image of uncertain gender: it was the staging of the threat posed by the reversal of roles and the consequent violation of moral norms."

Catholic women, on the other hand, as Conci herself later pointed out, had been prepared for their new political commitment through their active participation in the Resistance, which tempered their courage and led them to develop a “sense of responsibility” towards a duty that was both moral and social. Women “could no longer remain absent from the work of rebuilding the country” and therefore entered politics, according to Conci, “bringing with them everywhere the valuable contribution of their competence and generosity”.

Conci was the architect of women's political education and strenuously defended their rights. She worked to make them aware of the rights and duties associated with voting; she effectively promoted their participation in civic life; at the same time, she fought for the real inclusion of women within the Christian Democratic Party. Her commitment was therefore directed externally towards all Italian women and internally towards the life of the Party, which men mainly ran.

My presentation will examine the speeches delivered by Elsa Conci, national delegate of the Christian Democratic Women's Movement, from 1954 to 1964.

This paper examines shared reading of illustrated picturebooks as a form of women’s cultural and relational work that facilitates emancipatory pathways in migrant contexts

Traditionally considered tools for children’s education, picturebooks are increasingly recognized in contemporary pedagogy as powerful mediators of meaning for adult learners, especially where linguistic barriers, social marginalization, and gendered power asymmetries intersect.

The study is based on community workshops with migrant women and local volunteers in Tor Pignattara (Rome), a multicultural neighborhood with long-term migrant settlement and conditions of “incomplete integration.” Despite stable residence, many women face linguistic dependency, limited access to public participation, and subtle forms of invisibilization.

This study adopts a qualitative, ethnographic approach to explore the potential of shared reading of illustrated picturebooks as a pedagogical tool for promoting intercultural inclusion and temporarily suspending social asymmetries in adult marginalization contexts. Data collection includes participant observation, reflective journaling, semi-structured interviews, and analysis of narrative materials produced during the workshops. Thematic analysis followed an inductive approach, emphasizing triangulation of sources to deepen the understanding of relational processes and symbolic agency among migrant women participants.

Through collective reading and dialogic interpretation, participants engaged in processes of self-reconstruction. The metaphorical power of illustrated picturebooks created a “third space” where women could gather on equal terms, reimagining and reshaping their experiences. Using images, metaphors, and fictional characters, participants expressed experiences of migration, care work, exclusion, and resilience, without being confined to deficit-based or testimonial frameworks. Narrative practice thus functioned as a form of symbolic agency, enabling participants to re-signify lived experience and renegotiate their self-representations.

Empowerment is understood as relational and situated, emerging through shared narrative work. The workshops served as capacitating services, expanding expressive, relational, and participatory capabilities often constrained in migrant women’s everyday lives.

By foregrounding narrative reconstruction as women’s cultural work, this paper contributes to debates on democratic citizenship, intersectionality, and emancipatory pathways. It argues that illustrated picturebooks, embedded in dialogic and horizontally structured spaces, generate micro-democratic environments of recognition and belonging, empowering migrant women to exercise symbolic agency and participate more fully in social life.