Conference Program

Globally, the foundations of democracy and the rule of law are under pressure. The number of democratic states governed by the rule of law is declining, and support for the international legal order, and thus for organizations like the European Union, the United Nations, and NATO, is proving fragile. Geopolitical allies, essential for peace and security, are no longer a given now that national governments around the world are experiencing pressure from or falling prey to (extreme) right-wing political movements. Big Tech and GenAI and their rising power play a crucial role in these developments.

Trust in government, democracy, and politics continues to decline, which is strengthened by an increase in affective polarization: people increasingly view others as opponents and even enemies, simply because they belong to a different group. While social cohesion does exist, it's often within their own bubble of like-minded people. Affective polarization reinforces populist and authoritarian tendencies, further undermining the fundamental principle of the democratic rule of law: checks and balances. Citizens do not longer have a shared definition of democracy. One segment of society sees democracy as the majority determining policy and which institutions have a right to exist, while another segment sees democracy as inextricably linked to the rule of law, meaning that minority interests are also protected, and the concept of checks and balances is crucial to ensuring that powers monitor and balance each other. This form of polarization shifts the political and social debate from cooperation to conflict, making the government increasingly perceived as rudderless.
However, how do we come into grip of this destruction of democracy? Where to begin with turning the tide? Is there a way to build a resilient democracy for the future? This paper searches for answers to these fundamental questions by shedding light on education, more specifically higher education. Central research question of this paper is how higher education can contribute to ensure that (future) residents are (more) involved in democratic decision-making, while simultaneously strengthening social cohesion as an essential condition for the sustainable functioning of an inclusive democratic legal order? The main purpose – and the theoretical framework – of the paper is to show in which way practice-based research can be integrated into education and teaching (methods) in higher education, more specifically on the level of Universities of Applied Sciences. Teachers should get the tools to convey and disseminate democratic values to the next generation of professionals, that is responsible for the resilience of our democracy now and in the future. The paper departs from a Dutch point of view, but also tries to extend the answer to the central question to the European and international level.

The digital transformation of public administration is often promoted in terms of efficiency and modernization, yet its ethical and democratic implications remain insufficiently examined. This paper presents an experimental project on the ethical deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across public sector decision-making, a field exposed to integrity risks, procedural complexity, and fragmented data infrastructures.

The project proposes a model of “assistive AI” designed to enhance transparency, anomaly detection, and accountability without replacing human decision-making. The framework incorporates natural language processing (NLP) for automated document analysis, interpretable red-flagging systems for identifying irregularities, distributed ledger technologies for traceability, and public-facing dashboards to support civic oversight. Mandatory human supervision, algorithmic registries, and dual-layer rights to explanation—technical and civic—ensure AI operates as a support tool rather than a substitute for officials.

A comparative reflection considers the case of “Diella,” an avatar introduced in Albania as a digital minister for administrative oversight. While symbolically innovative, this example raises concerns about the personalization and depoliticization of algorithmic authority. In contrast, the proposed model emphasizes distributed institutional responsibility, structured oversight, and participatory governance, aligning with international initiatives such as the UK Ministry of Justice’s collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute on responsible AI in judicial systems.

Empirical evidence is drawn from a panel italian survey of public administration professionals and stakeholders (n=408), designed to assess perceptions of AI’s role in governance. Results indicate moderate trust in institutions, high demand for transparency in automated decisions, and strong opposition to fully automated decision-making without human oversight. While AI is perceived as a tool for improving integrity and efficiency, legitimacy is conditional upon explainability, auditability, and robust accountability mechanisms. Public acceptance correlates positively with transparency, contestability, and reversibility.

Preliminary pilot outcomes suggest improved anomaly detection, enhanced traceability of administrative processes, and increased accessibility of information for stakeholders. Persistent challenges include fragmented data systems, organizational resistance, and potential technological dependencies.

The study concludes that democratic renewal under algorithmic governance depends less on computational sophistication than on the design of accountability architectures. AI can strengthen integrity, transparency, and public trust only if embedded in open, auditable, and participatory frameworks. The key challenge is not whether algorithms can make decisions more efficiently, but whether institutions can govern algorithmic power in ways that preserve human responsibility, plural oversight, and democratic legitimacy.

The expansion of the academies programme in England since 2000 has profoundly reshaped school governance, particularly through the growth of Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs). As schools move from local authority oversight to trust-based control in the form of MATs, traditional stakeholder models of governance grounded in election, parental representation and local democratic accountability, have increasingly been displaced by professionalised forms framed by managerialism and corporatisation (Healey, 2024; Wilkins 2017). These emphasise risk management, performance metrics and skills-based appointments.

This transformation raises a central question aligned with this panel: under what conditions does professionalized governance protect democracy, and when does it operate as a vehicle of dominance and depoliticisation? In the context of MATification, I argue that professionalisation is frequently mobilised as a technology of managerial control rather than as a democratic resource. Executive leaders and trustees consolidate authority through appeals to expertise, compliance and corporate responsibility, while parental and community actors are repositioned as consultative or symbolic participants.

Drawing on Mouffe’s (1999) theory of agonistic pluralism, I conceptualise school governance as an inherently political space structured by competing values and interests. However, organisational and hybrid forms of professionalism within MATs often reframe political disagreement as risk, inefficiency or reputational threat. Governance is cast as a technical practice oriented towards consensus and performance, rather than as a forum for contestation and value negotiation.

Empirically, the paper draws on interviews and observations from an ethnographic study of three MATs. I illuminate how professionalised governance structures privilege managerial authority over democratic deliberation and narrow the space for dissent. Parental engagement is frequently repurposed as a mechanism for securing legitimacy and compliance, rather than enabling meaningful participation in decision-making. In this context, parents are positioned less as democratic actors mediating competing claims and more as recipients of professional judgement.

These dynamics foreground the educational dimension inherent in professionalism. Professional practice involves the transmission of knowledge from “experts” (executive leaders, governance professionals, trustees) to “lay” actors (parents and communities). Legitimated in the name of public interest or improved outcomes, this pedagogic function extends beyond technical matters to shaping expectations, orientations and acceptable forms of conduct. Under neoliberal conditions marked by individualisation and depoliticisation, such processes risk reinforcing asymmetries, paternalism and subtle forms of institutional domination.

Against these trends, I mobilise agonistic pluralism to reimagine democratic professionalism in school governance. Rather than treating conflict as dysfunction, an agonistic approach understands disagreement as constitutive of democratic life. I ( argue for reopening political space within MAT governance through parent-led bodies with genuine decision-making authority, publicly accountable forums that legitimise contestation, and collaborative policymaking processes that recognise dissent as a democratic necessity.

The paper contributes to debates on professionalism in contemporary public governance by showing how organisational professionalism within hybrid governance arrangements can both enable and constrain democracy. It reframes parental engagement as a contested political space shaped by asymmetrical power relations and invites reflection on how professionalism in education might move from being a vehicle of depoliticisation to a practice of “doing democracy” in neoliberal times.

Over time, sociological debate has highlighted the relationship between professions and the State as a key element in the development of Western societies and their institutions.

During the twentieth century, alongside traditional ‘occupational professionalism,’ a new ideal of ‘organizational professionalism’ developed, characterized by rational forms of authority, the standardization of working practices, and the attribution of responsibilities from outside professional groups. More recently the term "hybridity" has been used to relate the coexistence of different combinations of strands of professionalism and organizational principles within public organizations. Hybridization arises when professional and managerial principles converge, requiring professionals to reconcile competing institutional logics and to act as bridges between them.

From an institutional perspective, professions are seen as "vectors of the institutional democratic project" since, when professionalism operates coherently, it contributes to shaping and consolidating the institutional design of democratic society. Professionalization is part of broader processes of institutionalization: professions are themselves institutions and view organizations as the primary vehicles for carrying out institutional work, implementing reforms (which are manifestations of institutional change), and shaping the role identities of professionals (which, in turn, represent institutional stability). Professions can also be understood as the trait d’union between social rights (such as health, defense, information and social assistance) and their effective protection.

Institutional theory also highlights the growing relevance of hybrid professional roles in the public sector, where professional and managerial logics intersect and must be negotiated. Within bureaucracies, professions become crucial when decisions require specialized knowledge and value-based judgment, as well as technical expertise grounded in both abstract knowledge and experiential learning.

In fields such as social work, professionalization has historically been intertwined with organizational development. In Italy, the recent introduction of the LEPS – Livelli Essenziali delle Prestazioni Sociali, has defined essential social services that must be guaranteed nationwide. This reform has also led to the recognition of professional social work and professional supervision for social workers as LEPS. While social work is expected to assume a stronger role in organizational decision-making, professional supervision is assigned a strategic institutional function, aimed not only at supporting practitioners and preventing burnout, but also at enhancing their capacity to influence decision-making and to negotiate with their organization on technical and methodological matters.

An analysis within professional supervision processes involving social workers in Sicilian Local Social Areas in the Sourthen Italy has been carried out, to highlight working practices and organizational dynamics in public social services, which affects institutional change and its development, as well as the transmission of established operational practices from senior social workers’ to younger practitioners.

The results reveal limited awareness of social workers’ organizational role, highly bureaucratized contexts that constrain their perceived influence, and a professional identity experienced as restricted within rigid and resistant systems. These results point to the need for further investigation into the relational dynamics between professionals and organizations in order to strengthen the organizational role of social workers.

This work investigates how neoliberal rationality is reshaping institutional mandates and clinical practices within Italy's public territorial mental health services, drawing on an empirical case study of the Emilia-Romagna region. Italy was the first country to legislate the closure of asylums (Law 180/1978), establishing a community-based psychiatric model centred on territorial Mental Health Centres. Emilia-Romagna played a pioneering role in this process and remains among the best-resourced regions nationally, making it a critical case: if structural tensions between care and managerial logic manifest even in a context of relative excellence, the phenomenon acquires systemic rather than contingent significance.

The theoretical framework combines Foucauldian genealogy with materialist analysis. From Foucault's lectures on biopolitics and governmentality, the study draws the concept of neoliberalism as a rationality that governs through freedom, structuring the field of possible action rather than imposing direct constraints. This lens is integrated with Chapman's neurodivergent Marxism, which grounds the genealogy of normality in material structures, Castel's analysis of risk management and the post-asylum reconfiguration of the psychiatric apparatus, Rose's account of governing through community and the production of autonomous, responsibilized subjects, and the contributions of Brown, Dardot and Laval on neoliberal subjectivation.

Methodologically, the research employs a qualitative exploratory design based on a single holistic case study. Data were gathered through four semi-structured in-depth interviews with strategically sampled key informants positioned at different levels of the apparatus — governance, clinical practice, and civil society — and through the analysis of regional institutional documents treated as artefacts of managerial rationality. The analysis follows Braun and Clarke's thematic analysis within an abductive logic.

The findings reveal that neoliberal rationality does not operate through frontal opposition to the logic of care, but through subsumption. The managerial grammar of performance indicators renders relational care invisible: what resists quantification tends to disappear from institutional visibility. Structural resource scarcity, the decline of territorial outreach, and the transformation of Mental Health Centres into predominantly outpatient services are experienced not as externally imposed constraints, but as internalized conditions — precisely the mode of governing through freedom that Foucault theorized. Furthermore, the institutional adoption of the recovery paradigm, while retaining emancipatory potential when grounded in material conditions and egalitarian relationships, simultaneously functions as a vehicle for the subsumption of neoliberal logic, shifting the burden of care from public services to families and the third sector and risking the responsibilization of individuals for structural failures. Finally, the analysis identifies a paradox of resistance: operators' capacity to deliver quality care despite structural constraints may inadvertently stabilize the very apparatus they contest, insofar as the system need not change while good clinical work continues to mask systemic inadequacies.

The research examines the transformation of Masters in Social Work as a critical lens through which to observe the tensions of contemporary professionalism in neoliberal times.
The study investigates how welfare transformations, marked by economic constraints and rising social complexity, retroact upon professional training, shaping the potential for either democratic engagement or institutional domination within public services.

Grounded in debates on the evolution of professionalism and its shift from traditional occupational models toward organizational and hybrid forms (Cataldi, Tomatis, 2024), the research addresses two questions:
1) What trends characterize advanced social work education across European welfare regimes?
2) What are the professional-training needs of Italian Master’s programs in Social Work?
Through a dual-level methodology, a macro-level documentary analysis of 18 European Master's programs in Politics and Social Work, complemented by a comprehensive overview of the Italian LM-87 class, and a meso-level analysis of 12 semi-structured interviews with Piedmontese public and third-sector stakeholders, the study provides situated understanding of how professional education responds to neoliberal pressures.

The European mapping confirms the impossibility of a uniform training model, revealing how Masters’ curricula are shaped by the architecture of different welfare regimes (Laging, Žganec, 2021). The Italian landscape presents a fragmented picture, characterized by four main specialization axes: service governance, social policy design, innovation, and research.
This richness conceals risks of potential fragmentation of professional identity, an economistic drift that subordinates social rights to managerial logics, and a structural territorial divide that reproduces the country's socio-economic inequalities (Cellini, Dellavalle, 2022).

The findings resonate with the interrogation of professionalism under neoliberal governance.
The economistic drift identified in curricula reflects the penetration of managerialist logics into professional education, a key feature of post-democratic transformations where technical-administrative rationality displaces political contestation over social rights.
The fragmentation of professional identity threatens the collective capacity of social workers to act as a countervailing force against institutional violence and discriminatory welfare practices.

Stakeholder interviews reveal a perception of identity crisis within Master's-level education, suspended between specialist intervention training and process manager formation (Cellini, Scavarda, 2020).
This tension mirrors broader debates on whether professionalism can function as a vehicle for democratic renewal (Touijn, Dellavalle, 2017) or instead becomes complicit in authoritarian forms of governance through depoliticized technical expertise. The educational dimension inherent in professional practice acquires particular significance: curricula shape not only technical competencies but also cognitive orientations toward citizenship, rights, and the public good.

The research contributes to understanding how professional education might foster resistance against neoliberal authoritarianism. Findings indicate the necessity of training that integrates critical policy analysis and contextual advocacy tools that enable professionals to navigate the tensions between managerial “efficiency” and democratic responsiveness.
By illuminating the polarities characterizing Master's-level education and its relationship with the professional field, the study provides a foundation for rethinking how social work professionalism might be reclaimed as a democratic practice, capable of countering the multiple forms of counterintuitive and discriminatory welfare that characterize contemporary post-democratic conditions.

I wrote a book in 2019 ‘Democratic professionalism in public services’ which explored what it meant for public service professionals to act in a democratic way. I would like to take this opportunity to explore how three crises that have affected Britain since 2019 have impacted on the practice of democratic professionalism, using a framework of risk and uncertainty.

Although writing in the late 20^th century, Ulrich Beck was concerned with the “hidden emancipatory aspects of global risks” and “emancipatory catastrophism”. Zhang, Kong (2025) argue that resilience in a disaster can be improved by involving many stakeholders in the process of learning through crisis. This raises further questions about who defines the learning from a crisis, particularly which groups and how these groups resolve their differences. Muspratt-Palmer et al (2024) concluded that the process of learning is as important as the learning itself. This has implications for welfare professionals reacting to crises. As crises are characterised by uncertainty and risk, public professionals and services users must be able to come together in a shared learning process to facilitate a sense of emancipation. This will be essential for the formation of democratic professionalism. Professional expertise will have to undergo a transformation if democratic professionalism is to be embedded in public services during periods of crises.

The COVID-19 pandemic features both as a major crisis and as a shadow where the learning has not yet been completed, as seen in the on-going COVID public inquiry. The second crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, resulted in extensive public service strikes, which were initially received sympathetically by service users because they were also experiencing the effects of rising prices. Trade union activity tried to focus on how an adequately paid workforce was essential for high quality public services. A third crisis, which had already begun by 2020, was how immigration has become a politically polarising issue, even with the creation of the Sanctuary movement in cities and schools, which generated forms of democratic professionalism.

The impact of these three crises is still being assessed. The COVID Inquiry is now in its final weeks of hearing evidence. The cost of living remains a live political issue and trade union action is continuing. Immigration is considered a major political problem with greater polarisation across society. The paper will conclude with an assessment of future opportunities for democratic professionalism.

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This paper presents a mixed-method case study (Creswell, 2014) examining a decentralised model for organising the school-based tutor role in the fifth year of the Master’s Degree in Primary Education at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. The study analyses the relational and organisational dimensions of the practicum implemented in the Autonomous Province of Trento. It is situated within an ongoing phase of organisational and value-oriented transformation of the programme and seeks to contribute to the debate on possible directions for reorganising the curricular practicum and redefining university–school relations, particularly in light of proposals oriented towards centralisation and procedural streamlining justified in terms of efficiency and rationalisation.

The analysis focuses on the school-based tutor as a pedagogical mentor accompanying student teachers during the practicum, in structured dialogue with university coordinators. The tutor is interpreted as a co-responsible actor in processes of observation, planning, assessment, and professional reflection, performing a mediating function between academic knowledge and situated school practice.

The research design integrates longitudinal quantitative data covering four academic years (2022/23–2025/26) with qualitative data derived from participant observation during initial and debriefing meetings between school-based tutors and university coordinators, experimentally introduced from the 2024/25 academic year onwards.

Across the four-year period, 124 school-based tutors and 122 student teachers were involved, distributed across 45 Comprehensive Institutes, corresponding to approximately 85% of the provincial network. The findings highlight marked turnover in the role. The system is characterised by broad participation and limited reiteration of the same teachers over time, generating a widespread territorial distribution of practicum activities. This configuration reflects structural organisational and territorial heterogeneity, within which the decentralised model supports context-sensitive arrangements and differentiated learning pathways, aligned both with local educational needs and with students’ expressed requests. In a context characterised by high tutor rotation and voluntary engagement without structured financial recognition, sustainability appears to depend on a model grounded in distributed participation and context-sensitive coordination between university coordinators and individual schools.

Qualitative analysis highlights processes of professional dialogue and shared meaning-making around the tutor role, interpretable as the emergence of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998), grounded in mutual engagement and reflexivity. The meetings function not merely as coordination devices but as spaces of professional recognition and collective reflection. Their dialogical dimension fosters forms of situated responsibility and shared orientation that are difficult to generate through centralised assignment procedures. The school-based tutor role thus emerges as a form of educational professionalism shaped by situated autonomy, shared responsibility, and dialogical practice, operating in tension with centralising and managerial governance logics.

If democracy is understood not only as a formal institutional principle but as an enacted practice of participation and shared responsibility (Biesta, 2011), the case suggests that future reorganisation of the practicum should strengthen these dialogical spaces rather than introduce additional formalised designation procedures, while preserving attention to local contexts. The study concludes by discussing possible ways of sustaining educational professionalism as a democratic practice within a context marked by increasing managerialisation and hybrid governance arrangements.

This work is focused on the production and circulation of medical knowledge in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the aim is to investigate the link between personal and professional resilience and the sharing of knowledge and practices at a time of epistemic rupture. The COVID-19 pandemic required the healthcare system to rapidly adapt to an unknown virus. This challenge led the medical and scientific communities to develop new knowledge and provide solutions, even without a solid evidence base to support them. In the early stages of the pandemic - at a time of epistemic rupture and in the absence of validated knowledge - the response of the scientific community and institutions was complemented by knowledge production ‘from below’ by professionals who were assisting patients at home (Lusardi et al., 2023; Lucchini, 2025).
The empirical case refers to a Community of Practice (CoP) formed by a network of health professionals spontaneously activated in Northern Italy during the first pandemic waves - CoP conceptualized as a group of people bound together in a common enterprise by relations of mutual involvement around a problem or domain of knowledge, producing a shared repertoire of resources (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wagner et al. 2019). Dynamics within the network were examined through a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), bringing out some analytical categories from the empirical field, and constructing a classification system articulated at different levels of generality. The collected audiovisual material (18 video interviews) was subjected to thematic analysis starting with an encoding of extracted text segments. The analysis was assisted by MAXQDA 2022 software.
The emerging narratives highlight the value of medical practice in a situation of structural crisis, giving meaning to individual action through shared processes of signification, filling the temporary absence of recognized and established knowledge. Moreover, the analysis of the professional network in question encourages reflection on the educational value of sharing experiences for the healthcare personnel involved and on the proactive contribution it can make to the National Health Service (NHS), specifically in situations of systemic uncertainty. It also reveals the potential, in terms of activism, of those healthcare professionals committed to building relationships, sharing relevant information, and promoting joint initiatives: a rich repertoire of experiences and tools that, under certain conditions, can be a valuable resource for the Italian NHS, which is struggling with financial sustainability issues that make it vulnerable in the face of the emergency.