Conference Program

In a global scenario characterized by intensified migration flows, racialized public narratives, and growing social polarization, democratic education cannot be conceived separately from intercultural justice. This contribution presents the experience of “Casetta Rossa”, a self-managed community space located in Rome and rooted in its local urban context, where an Italian language school for migrants functions as a space for the co-construction of intercultural knowledge and democratic education practices.

The contribution is based on a qualitative case study founded on narrative and participatory approaches. Rather than analyzing the language school as a functional integration service, the study interprets it as a critical pedagogical space in which migration, citizenship, and knowledge are continuously renegotiated. Through dialogic practices and collaborative learning, the experiences of the participants, multilingual repertoires, and situated narratives are recognized as epistemic resources (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In this sense, the school challenges assimilationist models and deficit-based representations, contributing to forms of social and epistemic justice consistent with a democratic and intercultural perspective.

The experience also highlights a second complementary dimension: the implementation of active citizenship by volunteers—former teachers, retired professionals, and neighborhood residents—who serve as language facilitators. Their involvement does not simply respond to a gap in services, but constitutes a civic practice through which individuals reposition themselves in the public sphere. Teaching Italian becomes a relational and political act, fostering intergenerational dialogue, mutual recognition, and shared responsibility. Both migrants and local residents thus participate in democratic learning processes that reshape their understanding of belonging and collective life.

Building on Appadurai's (1996) notion of locality as socially produced and dynamically negotiated, the paper argues that such grassroots educational practices generate emerging public spaces where alternative modes of urban citizenship can take shape. These spaces function as everyday infrastructures of democracy, where intercultural dialogue is not reduced to rhetoric but is realized through embodied encounters, negotiation of differences, and shared problem solving (Biesta, 2011; Amin, 2002). By placing intercultural education within lived urban practices, the contribution proposes a model of democratic education that goes beyond abstract references to diversity. The case of "Casetta Rossa" suggests that democratic and intercultural education takes shape in situated, relational, and conflict-aware contexts, where knowledge is co-constructed and citizenship is exercised collectively. Community-led language schools can therefore be understood as transformative spaces that connect migration, social justice, and democratic participation in concrete and meaningful ways.

In a context marked by intensified migratory flows, processes of racialization, and the polarization of public discourse, interculturality is assumed as a constitutive dimension of a substantive and situated democracy. This contribution adopts a critical stance that goes beyond the rhetoric of “diversity” and situates social and intercultural justice as a framework for meaning and action, illuminating the power asymmetries that cross bodies, borders, and forms of knowledge (Catarci & Fiorucci, 2015; Tarozzi & Torres, 2016; Aman, 2017).

From this perspective, non-formal education (NFE) is understood as an intentional, flexible, and contextual pedagogical-political space capable of generating transformative learning through dialogic and participatory practices (Schugurensky, 2020; Romi & Schmida, 2019). It is rooted in Dewey’s idea of experience as the matrix of knowledge and democracy as a form of associated living (Dewey, 1916/1938), in Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (1984), and in Freire’s emancipatory pedagogy founded on dialogue, conscientization, and praxis (Freire, 1970/2018).

These frameworks interweave with key contributions from the Italian tradition of popular education. Dolci’s reciprocal maieutics (1988; 1996) highlights dialogue as a tool for shared planning and nonviolent social transformation. Lorenzetto (1963; 1994) situates adult literacy within the context of lifelong education and active citizenship, while the experiences of don Milani and don Sardelli show how the spoken word and educational relationships can become devices of dignity and empowerment within marginalised contexts.

In the European landscape, instruments for recognizing non-formal and informal learning (EQF; Cedefop 2009–2016; Eurydice, 2024) offer opportunities to valorize intercultural, relational, and civic competences developed in real-life contexts. However, challenges persist due to territorial heterogeneity, fragmented regulations, and barriers to access, particularly for vulnerable groups. Hence, integrative strategies are proposed, such as co-designing intercultural skills with communities and services, creating forms of mediation rooted in local proximity networks, and developing community-based micro-credential systems.

Three case studies highlight the operational nature of NFE as a situated practice of social justice. At the Valdocco Oratory, within the Universal Civil Service, cooperative workshops involve young people with diverse backgrounds, fostering responsibility, nonviolent conflict management, and interreligious participation. At the Matera Penitentiary Institute, artistic workshops and the production of the magazine S-catenati support identity reconnection processes for incarcerated people and migrants. Within the Reception and Integration System of the Municipality of Latina, the Theatre of the Oppressed and the workshop “Mothers Without Borders” enable migrant women and victims of trafficking to engage with performative devices of speech, self-narration, and mutual support, revealing through an intersectional lens the entanglement of gender, migrant status, and socio-economic vulnerabilities.

Building on these experiences, non-formal education emerges as a pedagogical and political space capable of generating situated learning and expanding opportunities for democratic participation, fostering the creation of intercultural and democratic environments. The educational and humanizing process that sustains it challenges traditional rigidities and hierarchies, promoting models rooted in participatory democracy, social cohesion, and attention to context.

Across Latin America, educational debates have been deeply shaped by struggles over land, language, recognition, and the democratization of knowledge (Diaz R, et al., 2009). In this context, intercultural education has developed as a political and pedagogical project connected to Indigenous movements and broader claims for social justice. In Brazil, where colonial and racial hierarchies continue to structure access to rights and educational opportunities, intercultural education is closely linked to emancipatory pedagogies and justice-oriented frameworks (Freire, 1987; Tarozzi, 2015). It represents not merely a curricular adaptation, but a transformative horizon aimed at confronting structural inequalities and epistemic subordination (Candau & Russo, 2010; Furtado et al., 2024).

This paper presents a case study of the Programa de Formação de Professores para a Diversidade Étnica (PROETNOS), developed at the State University of Maranhão (UEMA), a public university located in Northeastern Brazil. The program is dedicated to the initial education of Indigenous teachers who will work in their own community schools. It emerged in response to Indigenous political demands for differentiated schooling grounded in interculturality, bilingualism, and the right to cultural self-determination (Guerrero, 2007).

The research is situated within the interpretative qualitative paradigm (Geertz, 1973), assuming intercultural citizenship as a system of meanings constructed within educational contexts. This perspective is articulated with a Freirean critical-emancipatory framework (Freire, 1987), oriented toward examining power relations, recognition processes, and the dynamics of marginalization embedded in teacher education. Methodologically, the study is based on documentary research analyzing institutional regulations and Pedagogical Course Projects (PPC) of the intercultural undergraduate degrees offered within PROETNOS. The analysis was conducted through Content Analysis and Thematic Analysis, supported by Atlas.ti software to structure categories and identify semantic interrelations across documents.

The theoretical framework draws on critical interculturality (Walsh, 2009), distinguishing it from functional approaches that acknowledge diversity without transforming hierarchical structures (Corbetta, 2020). It also engages with reflections on curriculum transformation and pedagogical mediation (Fleuri, 2001; Fiorucci, 2020), as well as with decolonial perspectives that challenge eurocentric epistemologies and the coloniality of power within education (Tavares, 2014; Matos, 2024).

Findings reveal that PROETNOS operates within tensions between national educational regulations and Indigenous community projects. Nevertheless, it illustrates how a public university can act as a space of resistance when it reconfigures its curricular structures to incorporate Indigenous languages, epistemologies, and community participation. Rather than limiting itself to inclusion within an existing monocultural framework, the program seeks to restructure initial teacher education through a decolonial and intercultural lens (Walsh, 2009). In doing so, it contributes to a broader project of social justice that connects access, recognition, and epistemic redistribution (Tarozzi, 2015).

The case demonstrates that, in the Brazilian and Latin American context, public universities can become institutional arenas where democratic renewal, Indigenous protagonism, and curricular transformation intersect (Aguiar, 2025).

This research proposes a situated case study (Yin, 2018) at the Colombian Amazonian triple border in Leticia - next to Brazil and Peru - aiming at understanding how forms of epistemic, pedagogical, and political agency are produced among historically excluded subjects. The study analyzes the pedagogical, cultural, and institutional mediations involved in the production, circulation, and legitimation of knowledge, particularly within territorially oriented higher education programmes (Mato, 2012).

The category of “mediation” is understood as the set of mechanisms, instruments, relationships, and practices operating between subjects, knowledges, institutions, and territories, enabling or constraining knowledge (co)production and circulation. From this perspective, mediation is not conceived as a neutral process of translation, but rather as a space of epistemological dispute shaped by power relations, coloniality, and disobedience (Mignolo, 2000).

Rather than approaching the territory as exceptional or “exotic,” this research treats it as a significant case capable of illuminating principles that are transferable to other border and migration contexts. In particular, it seeks to rethink pedagogy beyond restricted notions of “interculturality,” often reduced to multicultural or inclusion-based frameworks. Instead, pedagogy is conceptualized as a formative process oriented toward knowledge coproduction, autonomy, emancipation, and social transformation, especially for subjects experiencing systemic oppression (Escobar, 2020; Walsh, 2009; hooks, 2021).

The study is situated within the fields of critical pedagogy, critical interculturality, and decolonial pedagogy. It engages with the tradition of engaged sociology and Latin American emancipatory education, particularly the contributions by Orlando Fals Borda (2015), Paulo Freire (2008), Carlos António Brandão (2003). It also draws on scholarship on sociocultural mediations and decolonial epistemologies to examine how institutional and political conditions structure access to and recognition of knowledge in higher education (Mato, 2012).

Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative approach based on case study and Participatory Action Research (PAR) (Yin, 2018; Fals Borda & Rahman, 1991). Data collection combines in-depth semi-structured interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and document analysis. Fieldwork is organized in three phases: an initial exploratory stage; a more extended and in-depth phase; and a final stage focusing on restitution of findings and community dialogue, oriented toward collective projection and action.

The case presented is linked to the Universidad Nacional de Colombia’ Special Admissions Programme with a Territorial Approach aimed at young people, including members of Indigenous communities. This allows for examining how generational, pedagogical, and institutional mediations operate within a transborder Amazonian context.

The project seeks to contribute to rethinking pedagogy in crossborder settings (Anzaldúa, 2016) beyond frameworks of inclusion or hospitality, recognizing historically oppressed subjects as epistemic and political actors and proposing transferable principles for higher education and social transformation in other crossborder and migratory contexts.

In the EU Roma Strategic Framework for Equality, Inclusion and Participation 2020–2030, the European Union has identified several strategic areas within which Member States are called upon to act in order to improve the living conditions of Roma and Sinti populations and promote their effective social inclusion. The three fundamental pillars of the framework concern equality, inclusion, and participation of Roma communities.

However, the historical relationship between majority societies and Romani populations has long been marked by deeply rooted prejudices that have contributed to constructing a cultural opposition between “us” and “them” (Bravi, 2009; Burgio, 2015). This relationship has largely been monological. Drawing on the distinction between the I–Thou and I–It relations elaborated by Martin Buber, Roma and Sinti communities have often been reduced to objects of social representation rather than recognized as fully legitimate interlocutors within the public sphere.

The outcomes of this marginalizing relationship are documented in numerous reports. European data present a critical picture: although Roma and Sinti communities constitute the largest ethnic minority in Europe—estimated at between 10 and 12 million people (European Commission, 2020)—they continue to experience significant forms of marginalization. In the city of Rome, such marginalization is spatially configured through the presence of Roma camps and peripheral urban areas and is also reflected in processes of identity representation, both subjective and collective.

The Romani populations remains exposed to multiple and intersecting forms of exclusion and discrimination operating across different domains: educational (early school leaving and limited educational opportunities), social (employment, housing, and economic conditions), and political (citizenship and social recognition). These dynamics contribute to a condition of multidimensional marginality.

Within this context, the role played by organizations and association operating at the local level becomes particularly significant, as they perform several functions, including an educational one. The aim of this contribution is to present the experience developed by Rampa Prenestina, a cultural and social promotion association that, since 2013, has been active in the eastern area of the city of Rome, promoting non-formal educational activities connected to the social, political, and identity-related issues affecting the Roma community.

More specifically, through identity workshops and participatory theatre—conceived as a pedagogical device of subjectivation—processes of self-representation, critical re-elaboration of lived experience, and identity redefinition are fostered at both individual and collective levels, grounded in the analysis of participants’ social and identity-related needs.

In this way, young participants become active subjects in a process of conscientization (Freire, 1968/2018) generated through the theatrical experience, enabling them to articulate the meaning of their identities within the societies in which they live while promoting processes of social transformation.

Through semi-structured interviews conducted with educators from the association—of both Roma and Italian backgrounds—the study examines the approach adopted in working with young people from Roma camps. In this context, theatre and identity workshops emerge as alternative dialogical spaces within which to reflect on the politics of identity, typically articulated by subaltern and marginalized groups (hooks, 1994).