Conference Program

A critical approach to AI literacy in adult learning and education (ALE) cannot overlook the fact that Generative AI (GenAI), the most commonly used tool for non-AI experts (Zhou et al., 2026), enters educational environments as a socio-technical assemblage (Lindgren, 2023). As such, GenAI systems encapsulate the political, epistemic, and socio-cultural perspectives of those who own, design, and commercialize AI systems, implying dominant epistemologies and amplifying asymmetrical power relations when generating content (Campolo & Crawford, 2020; Suchman, 2023).

In ALE environments, and particularly in those characterised by superdiversity (Pasta & Zoletto, 2023), in-service professional development in AI literacy must address reproduction and amplification of discriminatory practices in AI-generated content, such as the omission, subordination, and sterotyping of students’ differences in educational content and materials (Shieh et al., 2024). Recent research (Selwyn et al., 2025) highlights teachers’ practices of remixing or rejecting AI-generated content that mismatches with pedagogical and ethical expectations. Such practices, which can be defined postdigital (Jandrić et al., 2018) as they take place somewhere between online and offline, can also be considered as practices of repairing GenAI malfunctions. Literature on repair and maintenance (Denis & Pontille, 2023) frames human interaction with technology as potentially transformative, given that agency can be recognised to users when they engage with technology (and its malfunctions) by reconfiguring its potential uses and the values embedded in its original design (Steinert, 2024).

Building on sociomaterial approaches in ALE (Fenwick & Edwards, 2013), this contribution presents the initial findings form a participatory action research (Bove, 2019; Medrado & Verdegem, 2024) investigating in-service teachers’ practices with GenAI in Adult Education Centres in Italy (CPIAs) throguh the explicitation (Vermersch, 2005) of teachers’ postdigital practices. The thematic analysis (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006) of the qualitative data generated in preparation of and during the action research provides insights into teachers professional considerations and strategies when interacting with GenAI regarding the design and personalisation of learning materials, and the mitigation of bias in AI-generated content.

Following the maintenance perspective, such postdigital practices of teachers interacting with GenAI tools can be interpreted as practices of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) regarding their educational environments, according to what teachers may consider good education (Biesta, 2015) for adult students with diverse migratory and educational backgrounds. In this sense, teachers’ repairs of GenAI can be seen as examples of siutated AI literacy, a site of professional agency and epistemic negotiation of dominant AI-generated narratives through critical maintenance of GenAI in superdiverse adult education.

This paper analyses the institutionalisation of obstetrics in the Papal States between 1786 and 1845, examining a case in which education, women’s work and female agency converged to produce an early and structurally democratic process of professional emancipation.

The research focuses on the history of the San Rocco delle partorienti e delle celate Hospital in Rome and draws upon primary sources preserved in the State Archives of Rome (ASR, University Fund, Envelopes 24-43-44-47-59-69-761-1083). It argues that the institutionalisation of the midwifery profession was fundamentally driven by a pedagogical challenge, one that ultimately reconfigured the social and epistemic conditions under which women could legitimately claim professional authority.

In 1786, Pasquale di Pietro, a consistorial lawyer, financed Professor Francesco Asdrubali’s trip to Paris, where Asdrubali trained at the school of Jean-Louis Baudelocque, author of L’art des accouchements (1781) and architect of a teaching method grounded in anatomical measurement and practical simulation using a mannequin. Asdrubali subsequently brought this method to Rome, together with a premise that was radical for the period: that obstetric knowledge could be taught, assessed and formally certified to women.

The Edict of Cardinal Camerlengo Carlo Rezzonico of 1786 established that female students were required to complete a full academic course (ASR, University Fund, Envelope 59, 1786) prior to practising professionally, thereby transforming the empirical transmission of knowledge characteristic of the mammane into a regulated public training programme. It was precisely through institutional access to scientific knowledge that women secured the right to practise midwifery legitimately. A silver medal awarded annually to the most distinguished student at San Rocco Hospital gave formal recognition to this important achievement.

Archival sources demonstrate that women were by no means passive recipients of this transformation: they were conscious and active agents within it. The licence registers document a wide and geographically diverse professional community, including Maria Antonelli (1815), Caterina Allini and Angiola Ansolmi (1816), Giulia Botti of Urbino and Teresa Bresciani of Macerata (1820), Bernardina Angeloni (1827), Lucia Altipimi, widow of Gentili of Tivoli (1831) and hundreds of others.

The annotation free appearing beside certain names is not a marginal detail: it constitutes evidence of a deliberate policy of inclusion, demonstrating that the Department of Obstetrics at San Rocco Hospital, responsible for issuing licences and administering training (ASR, University Fund, Envelopes 43, 44, 47, Licence Registers, 1815–1845), recognised the transformative potential of professionalisation with respect to class distinctions and social democratisation. Particularly eloquent is the handwritten petition in Envelope 1083, in which Anna Conti requests from Monsignor Filipponi the position of substitute midwife left vacant by Anna Maria Andreoli — not an appeal for charity, but the conscious exercise of an acquired right.

This paper contends that the professionalisation of the art of childbirth at San Rocco Hospital constitutes a genuine historical laboratory of female emancipation mediated by pedagogy, predating the major nineteenth-century movements for women’s rights. Restoring a name and a voice to each of these women contributes not only to the history of women, but to the history of education itself.

Gender-based violence affects women and girls around the world (WHO, 2021). This phenomenon becomes even more complex in relation to women with disabilities, who are two to five times more likely to experience violence than women without disabilities (WHO, UN Women & HRP, 2024).
From the perspectives of Feminist Disabilities Studies (Garland-Thomson, 2005; Mays, 2006) and the Intersectionality Approach (Crenshaw, 1989), women with disabilities experience the intersection of multiple systems of oppression (i.e. sexism, ableism, classism, etc.) which expose them to multiple discrimination and multidimensional violence (EDF, 2021). Particularly concerning are physical and sexual forms of violence, which disproportionately affect women with intellectual disabilities and occur mainly within intimate relationships and caregiving or family contexts (Meyer et al., 2022; García-Cuéllar et al., 2022).
A further critical issue concerns the invisibility of victims, described as “bodies without weight on the scales of social justice”(Bernardini, 2018, p. 12).
Women with disabilities are often excluded both from official statistics on gender-based violence and from policies aimed at preventing and addressing violence (WHO, UN Women & HRP, 2024).
This invisibility is also reflected in the functioning of support services, from which they remain excluded due to multidimensional accessibility barriers and insufficient professional competence on the intersections between gender-based violence and disability (Robinson et al., 2021).
Considering these critical issues, the contribution reflects on the educational challenges that Special Education should address to promote prevention strategies and emancipatory pathways for women with disabilities who have experienced violence (Romano and Taddei, 2024; UN, 2015, SDG 5.2).
Attention is paid to the role of narrative and autobiographical practices as pedagogical devices capable of fostering processes of personal and social transformation (Giaconi and Capellini, 2019; Taddei, 2020; 2022).
Through narrative, women with disabilities can reinterpret their experiences, recognize their rights, and strengthen processes of empowerment. At the same time, narratives contribute to challenging the sexist and ableist stereotypes that sustain violence and discrimination. At least, it provides researchers and practitioners with valuable insights for the development of inclusive anti-violence services and support interventions.
Within this perspective, peer counselling (Patterson, 1990) emerges as a particularly effective transforming training strategy based on the sharing of personal experiences and mutual support. The literature highlights its emancipatory potential with women with disabilities (Barbuto et al., 2006).
The processes of mirroring, empathy, and recognition of lived experience that develop between the counselor and the counselee foster the learning of trauma coping strategies, increased self-confidence, and hope for a self-determined and emancipated future (Collings, et al., 2020; Aguillard et al., 2021).
In conclusion, the need to promote participatory research projects in synergy between the scientific community, services, and women with disabilities is emphasized. As illustrated in a recent study (Buettgen et al., 2025), leveraging the experiential knowledge of women with disabilities is a key element in designing inclusive anti-violence services that include educational strategies that truly address the support needs of women with disabilities.

The contribution aims to examine the relationship between feminist claims and pedagogical reflection in bell hooks’ thought, exploring some of the theoretical and epistemological assumptions that inform her engaged pedagogy. Specifically, through a combined historical and theoretical reading, it seeks to foreground hooks’ contribution to expanding the horizons of feminist and anti-racist critique, thus drawing attention to the theoretical frameworks that shaped her conception of teaching as transgression—against and beyond boundaries.

Situating the analysis within the intellectual climate of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and in implicit dialogue with Audre Lorde’s thought, the talk will, on the one hand, reconstruct the historical, social, and cultural milieu in which hooks’ early writings—often read as precursors to intersectionality—took shape; on the other, it will show how the cultural and political work of leading figures of Black feminism contributed to redefining the categories of woman, difference, and liberation within the feminist and anti-racist movements that emerged between the 1960s and 1970s. From this perspective, Black feminism can be understood as an epistemic practice—shaped by the “outsider within perspective” (Collins, 1986)—aimed at expanding the traditional boundaries of knowledge, citizenship and democratic participation by interrogating the relations among race, gender, social class and sexuality, thus opening up new possibilities for political imagination.

Against this background, drawing on central motifs in the thought of Lorde and hooks—especially the interplay between experience, language, and action—there emerges a reconceptualization of power as a generative and creative force capable of shaping processes of subjectivation as well as fostering forms of critical reflexivity in both teachers and learners. Within this framework, hooks’ engaged pedagogy appears as a deeply political and relational act (Maddalena, 2025), as the outcome of a broader radical feminist vision aimed at challenging hierarchies while fostering mutual transformation.

This paper aims to analyse the theme of the democracy of care and the possibility it offers to weave networks and relationships that are alternatives to the patriarchal model, focusing on the representative example provided in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.

The networks of ambivalent and complex relationships that develop between the women in the tetralogy, although they unfold on different levels and in multiple ways, can be broadly categorised into two main groups. On the one hand, the impromptu moments of confrontation in which the women find themselves discovering, with a light-heartedness and a playful spirit tinged with bittersweet tragicomedy, the difficulties they share in navigating the male rules (Ferrante 2012: 81). The shared experiences discovered in face-to-face encounters with one another and the resulting unexpected alliance forged in these occasional moments of self-awareness are, at the same time, both a personal and political prerequisite for the explosion of collective organisational movements that constitute the second broad category under consideration.

We will examine figures of men and women who embody patriarchy in its most overt forms of physical violence, but also in the more subtle forms of psychological violence and the more systemic forms of symbolic violence. In contrast to these models, we will seek to outline the complex exemplarity of the democratic project, which is articulated in the complementarity between the relational history of the biographical narratives of two women and Italian, European and global history, from the post-war period up to the 2000s. The moments of relational networks between women come to represent the ‘history’ and the ‘History’ of feminism: the representations, the destinies of women, the constitution of individuality and otherness in shared lives that are part of the overwhelming tide of the founding and widespread diffusion of Italian feminism.

The model of the democracy of care proposed by Ferrante is revolutionary from the very moment of its articulation and artistic assertion. Among the major gaps in a patriarchal literary history is, in fact, the scant literary representation of relationships between women (Woolf 2013: 174), whilst cultural and linguistic representations show a strong emphasis on the demonisation of female relationships (Federici 2004: 243).

For Ferrante, the choice to depict female friendship serves merely as a starting point for a broader symbolic and representational redefinition of relationships between women, paving the way for a political, literary and philosophical project that challenges the egotistical framework of the Subject (Cavarero 1997: 78).

Considering the foundational principles of feminist thought, a revolutionary democracy of care begins with a new conception of the relationship with mothers and friends. The narrative of patriarchal motherhood is subjected to critique so that it may be accepted in its ambivalence and analysed as the first form of mutual dependence experienced between women. Recognising oneself in the Other and the fundamental importance of sisterhood among women for each woman’s survival in the patriarchal world offer a narrative of friendship that stands in critical opposition to simplistic representations of relationships that are subservient to the male world.

According to the last International Council of Museums (ICOM) definition of 2022, museums are: «Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, [fostering] diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing»[1].

Although lagging significantly behind the international scene, in recent years Italian museums embraced the themes of accessibility, critical thinking and contemporary social issues from an intersectional perspective. This theoretical alignment is usually reflected in the exhibition topics. However, the incorporation of this perspective is most often the responsibility of the Education Department, which manages relations with the public. Measuring a museum's social impact involves creating a genuine dialogue between the public and the institution, as well as promoting a governance model that responds as much as possible to the public's needs, both as a community to which the museum belongs and as a community it represents. The aim of this ongoing research project is to explore the reasons behind and the foundations of the creation of the Museum of Impact Framework, and to investigate whether and how Italian museums incorporate the theme of social impact. Based on the tool’s glossary, an interview framework will be developed and presented to a sample of education departments in Italian museums located across different geographical areas, starting with those specializing in contemporary art.

[1] Italics by the author

The English Scientist Alan Turing, with his hypothesis, aimed at establisishing a mathematical analogy between the numerical computer and the human mind. Turing therefore examines the main objections to the idea that machines can think and, at the same time, proposes his own definition of thought and intelligence. This definition comes from his refutation of the argiument proposed by Ada Byron Lovelace, known as the "Lady Lovelace objection". Turing cites a statement by Lovelace, often regarded as the first programmer in history, taken from an essay on the Analytical Engine designed by the inventor Charles Babbage. In this text she states that "the Analytical Engine has no pretentions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” According to this view, a machine would be incapable of producing anything truly new, merely executing instructions and performing actions whose consequences are predictable for humans. Although neither Lovelace nor Babbage could foresee the later developments and potential of computing machines, Turing considers this claim incorrect. The weak version of the Lovelace objection argues that a machine can never do anything genuinely new. Turing responds ironically by invoking the saying “There is nothing new under the sun,” adding that no one can be certain that their own “original work” is not simply the result of a seed planted by education or the consequence of applying well-known general principles. Finally, Turing addresses the strong version of the objection, according to which a machine can never take a human by surprise. He challenges this claim by referring to his own experience, noting that machines often surprise him. Although he recognizes that this response is not fully decisive, he observes that judging something as “surprising” always requires a creative mental act, whether the source of the surprise is a human being, a book, a machine, or something else. Turing beliefs that machines cannot produce surprising outcomes often stems from a common error, particularly among philosophers and mathematicians: the assumption that once a fact appears in the mind, all its consequences are immediately apparent. As a result, people tend to underestimate the value of simply working out the consequences of given data and general principles, overlooking the genuine significance of such processes. The objective of this abstract is to highlight the historical and pedagogical importance of Ada Lovelace, not only as a pioneer of computing but also as a figure of educational significance and as the first woman to address the issue of creativity and originality in computers. By examining the debate surrounding the Lovelace Objection, the study aims to emphasize the role of Lady Lovelace not only as a mathematician but also as an intellectual and pedagogical personality whose reflections on machines and logical instruction contribute to a broader pedagogical understanding of computational thinking. From this perspective, Lovelace emerges as an early thinker linking mathematical reasoning, education, and the conceptual foundations of computer science, becoming an anticipator and a key reference point for contemporary reflections on artificial intelligence.