Conference Program

Digital transformation of democratic processes has opened new possibilities for political participation, especially among youth (Kersting, 2016). Easy access to information and digital deliberation spaces may reinforce political engagement (Kersting, 2016; van Dijk, 2012). However, digital information contexts may increase exposure to misinformation, disinformation, manipulation or polarization of opinions, and cognitive overload (Garcia et al., 2021; Schwaiger, 2022; Schweiger, 2017) with consequences for political participation. Information Literacy (IL) is a key competence to navigate the complexity of the infosphere and to participate responsibly in democratic life (Koren, 2023; Kurbanoglu, 2013; Smith, 2016). While much research on young people’s political attitudes and media use relies on self-reported measures, fewer studies combine such data with online information-seeking behavior; as a result, it remains unclear how these practices relate to turnout and vote choice (González-Bailón & Xenos, 2023).

The aim of the present study is to explore how young adults conduct online searches for political information. The study focuses on a Swiss federal popular vote on climate and energy policy held on 8 March 2026. Data collection took place while the voting period was still ongoing, meaning that some participants had already voted while others had not.

To address this aim, the following research questions are explored:
(1) How do young adults search for political information online when preparing to vote?
(2) Are individuals’ online information-seeking behaviors associated with stability or change in their voting intentions or vote choice? (3) Which informational and attitudinal factors are associated with voting intentions or vote choice?

The study employs the ROSE digital platform (Reflective Online Searching Education; Botturi et al., 2026) and a browser extension that captures ecological online information-seeking behavior, including search queries, visited websites, and time spent per webpage.

The research follows a structured pre–post design. In March 2026, 76 undergraduate students enrolled in pre-primary and primary teacher education in the Canton of Ticino (aged 19-32, M = 22.52) took part in: (1) an initial questionnaire assessing self-reported prior knowledge of the voting issue, voting intentions or vote choice, and IL skills; (2) a self-directed online searching session on the voting topic, monitored through the ROSE platform; and (3) a final questionnaire collecting socio-demographic data, political variables (political interest, internal and external political efficacy, ideological positioning, participatory habits), and repeated measures of knowledge and voting intentions or vote choice.

Preliminary analyses show a significant increase in perceived knowledge about the voting issue, a decrease in indecision, and greater willingness to vote. Furthermore, an initial qualitative analysis of the consulted sources indicates a predominant use of the official channels of the Swiss Confederation as sources of information. Further results will be presented during the conference.

By integrating behavioral data on online information-seeking with attitudinal and political variables in a real voting context, this study advances empirical research on democratic participation. The findings may also offer practical guidance for integrating IL and digital citizenship into pre-service and in-service teacher education and broader educational initiatives targeting young adults (Kops et al., 2025; van Dijk, 2012).

The PhD research project, “Digital Citizenship at School: a Digital Civic Education Curriculum for Upper Secondary Education”, aims to develop an evidence-based digital civic education curriculum inspired by Media Literacy Education. The project includes the design of a curriculum prototype to be tested through a research-action approach.

The introduction of Civic Education as a cross-curricular subject (Law 92/2019) and the Guidelines (MIM 2024) have raised a clear challenge for schools.

Civic Education can serve as a testing ground for transforming knowledge into consistent everyday behavior, and it is essential to develop students' ability to become conscious and active citizens in the digital ecosystem. This means going beyond the mere consumption of information and providing students with the tools to critically analyse the mechanisms that govern contemporary communication. From a media education perspective, students will have the opportunity to decipher hidden processes and learn to recognize how platforms can influence their perception of reality and their opinion on social facts and issues. They will also be equipped to unmask attempts at disinformation and distorted narratives that jeopardize public debate and the very foundations of democratic coexistence.

At the same time, students’ everyday lives increasingly take place in an “onlife” context (Floridi, 2019), where digital and offline experiences are deeply intertwined. Yet Civic Education often fails to reflect this reality.

More specifically, schools still struggle to meaningfully integrate a Media Education (ME) perspective into Civic Education. Digital issues are often addressed through a mainly technical or instrumental approach, rather than through a critical and reflective one that supports students’ digital well-being.

The main research question is how can a Civic Education curriculum informed by Media Education be designed to respond to students’ needs within the complexity of the contemporary, onlife world?

The research project aims to design, test and validate a Civic Education curriculum model inspired by a Media Education perspective, conceived as replicable and scalable. The objective is to foster in students an active, aware and responsible digital citizenship, especially regarding the issue of online disinformation.

The research is carried out in two highly differentiated school contexts (a classical high school and a technical/vocational institute in Palermo), in order to assess its effectiveness and adaptability of the model. The study analyses the impact of the educational pathway on students by assessing the development of digital citizenship competences, critical thinking, awareness of digital well-being, and the ability to produce responsible media content. The research project also includes an exploratory analysis, conducted through interviews and focus groups with policymakers, of school policies related to Civic Education and digital citizenship, in order to assess their alignment with the needs and realities of educational practice.

The project offers an opportunity to adopt a Media Education approach for the construction and development of students' media literacy, particularly with regard to the issue of disinformation (Cappello & Rizzuto, 2025). At the Fourth International Conference of Scuola Democratica, the initial research findings based on the experimentation conducted with students in February and March 2026 will be presented.

Across Europe, democracy is increasingly shaped by platformized media environments in which polarized public discourse and disinformation influence how citizens access information, interpret public issues, and participate in democratic life. Political disaffection and misinformation are often framed as problems of institutional failure or information disorder. Yet these diagnoses risk overlooking a deeper issue: democracy cannot be sustained by institutions and procedures alone. It must also be continuously learned, interpreted, and enacted by citizens in everyday life, as a lived and relational practice of democratic formation (Biesta, 2011).

Starting from this premise, the paper explores how citizens themselves understand the educational foundations of democracy, shifting attention from normative and institutional accounts to the meanings, experiences, and expectations expressed by ordinary people. The analysis draws on findings from the Horizon Europe project MeDeMAP – Mapping Media for Future Democracies and is based on a large-scale qualitative study involving more than 400 participants across ten European countries. Through focus groups and in-depth interviews on democracy, media, and participation, the research examines how citizens identify the educational conditions that allow democratic culture to endure and how they understand the formative role of media within increasingly platformized and information-polluted environments.

The paper makes an original contribution at both the empirical and conceptual levels. Empirically, it moves beyond formal policy frameworks and normative models of democratic competence to foreground citizens’ own accounts of how democracy is learned and experienced. Across highly diverse national and social contexts, participants consistently described democracy not simply as an institutional order, but as a social and interpretive practice shaped by everyday encounters with political information, public debate, mediated narratives, and competing claims to truth. This bottom-up perspective shows that democratic learning is not confined to formal civic education, but is embedded in the ordinary environments in which citizens encounter and make sense of public life (Freire, 1970).

Conceptually, the paper reflects on democracy as a pedagogical ecology, stressing that civic formation does not reside in any single institution but emerges across media systems, schools, families, communities, and citizens’ interpretive practices (Markham, 2019). In this perspective, media education is not limited to the acquisition of technical competences, but concerns the development of critical capacities through which citizens learn to evaluate claims, recognise manipulative narratives, and position themselves in relation to democratic life (Buckingham, 2003; Martens & Hobbs, 2015). Participants repeatedly described media not only as sources of information, but as pedagogical environments through which people learn to recognise public issues, negotiate meanings, and exercise civic agency (Giroux, 2011). At the same time, they stressed that these capacities cannot be taken for granted in environments marked by polarization, opacity, and disinformation. Schools, families, and civic institutions therefore remain essential spaces for cultivating critical media literacy and the democratic resilience needed to navigate contemporary public life.

Contemporary debates on disinformation often focus on the circulation of false or misleading content within digital environments. Yet the current crisis is not only informational but infrastructural. It concerns the transformation of the epistemic infrastructures through which knowledge becomes visible, credible, and authoritative in the public sphere. Rather than a simple crisis of information, the present moment can therefore be understood as a reconfiguration of the infrastructures that organize the production and validation of knowledge.

This paper develops the concept of epistemic capture to describe the process through which infrastructures governing the circulation and validation of knowledge are reorganized according to the logics of platform capitalism and broader techno-industrial complexes where economic interests, state governance, and military or security apparatuses increasingly intersect. Within these configurations, virality, immediacy, and data extraction reshape the visibility and legitimacy of knowledge while weakening the institutional autonomy of educational and scientific systems.

In an increasingly platformized global society, information infrastructures no longer operate as neutral communication channels but as socio-technical architectures that shape the circulation and credibility of knowledge claims. Algorithmic curation, recommendation systems, and opaque ranking mechanisms mediate how individuals access information and form judgments about truth and authority. As Bratton (2015) suggests, these computational architectures operate as quasi-sovereign systems capable of reorganizing public discourse beyond traditional institutional accountability, functioning as devices of digital governmentality that orient cognitive practices and regimes of visibility. In this context, can universities—historically central institutions in the validation and transmission of knowledge—still claim epistemic centrality in the public sphere, or is this role progressively migrating toward computational infrastructures governed by extra-academic logics?

From a historical perspective, this transformation recalls earlier technological asymmetries in the control of knowledge. Writing itself functioned for centuries as a technology of epistemic authority monopolized by small literate elites. Today, infrastructures of artificial intelligence, algorithmic mediation, and large-scale data extraction risk generating comparable forms of epistemic concentration if their functioning remains opaque to most citizens. One of the central democratic challenges of contemporary education therefore lies in preventing the emergence of a new form of computational epistemic oligarchy.

The paper draws on findings from an exploratory sociological study conducted with students at Sapienza University of Rome. Combining interviews and questionnaires, the research investigates how students acquire and evaluate information within contemporary media ecosystems. Preliminary findings reveal a significant epistemic asymmetry: although students inhabit digital environments daily, they rarely possess the conceptual tools required to critically interrogate the algorithmic infrastructures organizing knowledge production and legitimation.

The democratic question today concerns not only freedom of access to information but also the capacity to understand and interrogate the epistemic infrastructures that organize knowledge production. Universities are therefore called upon to reclaim their role as civic institutions capable of guaranteeing a democratic epistemic right: the capacity of citizens to access, understand, and critically interrogate the infrastructures structuring contemporary social life. This requires pedagogical strategies capable of making algorithmic cognition intelligible and democratizing the mathematical and computational foundations that structure the global information ecosystem.

In a contemporary information ecosystem characterised by data overload and the rapid spread of viral content, the ability to discern reliable information from various forms of information disorder - such as disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation - has become a fundamental competency for democratic citizenship. The Teachers 4.0 Digital Age project (funded by the Erasmus+ program) addresses this critical challenge through a large-scale capacity-building intervention designed for teacher training. The primary objective is to empower educators to integrate media literacy into their daily pedagogical practices across diverse subject areas.

This contribution analyses the development and implementation of the project’s comprehensive training curriculum, with a specific focus on the online course designed for in-service teachers and educators. The training program, delivered via a dedicated e-learning platform, is structured into 10 modules totalling 60 hours of professional development (comprising 30 hours of asynchronous learning and 30 hours of practical, hands-on activities). The curriculum covers a wide spectrum of crucial topics: from the deconstruction of media messages and the psychological dynamics of "echo chambers" and "filter bubbles" to the technical analysis of emerging threats like deepfakes, phishing, and algorithmic bias.

A distinctive element of this course is its methodological approach, which transcends the mere transfer of technical skills. Instead, it fosters a critical and reflective stance toward digital consumption. Teachers are guided through an exploration of their students' "digital realities", gaining insights into how the media practices of children and adolescents shape their perception of reality and socio-political issues. The e-learning platform serves as a collaborative environment where teachers can share best practices, exchange feedback, and co-design Learning Scenarios (LS) aimed at building digital resilience within the classroom.

Preliminary results from the project’s pilot phases indicate that online training, supported by multilingual educational materials (available in Italian, English, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Polish), effectively overcomes geographical and temporal barriers. Furthermore, the modular nature of the curriculum allows for a "blended" flexibility that adapts to different national school systems.

In this context, the paper will present the initial findings from the questionnaires administered to the teachers and educators who attended and completed the online course.

In the contemporary social web, democratic coexistence and civic agency are increasingly challenged by polarization processes that may evolve into cultural wars (santerini, 2025) and hate speech (Pasta, 2018). The Council of Europe Recommendation CM/Rec(2022)16 calls for particular attention to those forms of hate incitement which, while not reaching the threshold of criminal or civil liability, still threaten social cohesion and democratic stability. In this perspective, hate speech should not be understood only as an individual act of aggression, but as a phenomenon embedded in the communicative structures of platformized environments.

This contribution is situated within the research field of Postdigital Intercultures (Pasta & Zoletto, 2023), which investigates the challenges of living together, citizenship education, and social relations in the context of the everyday entanglement between sociocultural complexity and the plurality of languages, media, and environments characteristic of postdigital transformations. In highly mediatized societies, the relationships between individuals, communities, and socio-technical infrastructures become central to understanding how democratic participation and conflict are reshaped.

Contemporary forms of what may be defined as “hate speech onlife” are heterogeneous, yet they share common social and psychological dynamics that sustain hostility and antagonism. Investigating these dynamics is necessary in order to avoid naïve or purely moralistic approaches and to develop educational perspectives capable of addressing these phenomena in their cultural, social, and political dimensions. Alongside critical thinking, a cornerstone of media education, the co-authorial nature of the social web calls for an education to responsibility, understood as the ability to evaluate the consequences of one’s actions within mediated public spaces.

The category of hate speech can be described as “ambiguous but useful” (Pasta, 2025). Its ambiguity derives from the difficulty of defining clear boundaries between legitimate expression, offensive speech, and incitement to hatred, yet it remains a productive analytical lens for investigating the relationship between digital media, democratic life, and what has been defined as “citizenship onlife” (Pasta & Rivoltella, 2022).

The analysis develops along three main lines.
First, the paper examines some characteristics of digital environments that facilitate processes of targeting, stigmatization, and polarization. Algorithmic personalization, visibility metrics, virality mechanisms, and the persistence of content contribute to the selection of enemies and the formation of antagonistic publics, favoring emotional intensification and identity construction through opposition.

Second, the paper considers the transformation of hate discourse in the age of post-truth. In polluted information environments, the distinction between true and false becomes less relevant than the capacity of messages to mobilize emotions and reinforce group belonging. Irony, provocation, denial of responsibility, and claims of not being serious often function as discursive strategies that allow hostile expressions to circulate while avoiding accountability.

Third, the contribution outlines some educational directions aimed at countering online hate without reducing the issue to moral regulation or technical control. Strengthening civic agency requires developing awareness of the socio-technical conditions that shape communication, fostering critical reflection on the emotional and relational dimensions of online interaction, and promoting education to responsibility as a key competence for democratic life in postdigital societies.