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This paper describes the journey of a group of six international arts-based researchers who convened in 2019 at the ECQI for a Gamechanger event. The goal was to create a transdisciplinary and transglobal group advocating for the visibility, accessibility, and valuation of Arts-Based Research (ABR). The mission was driven by the desire to contribute to the understanding of underlying beyond-words human intersubjective phenomena and resulting collective behaviors that influence our world but elude more traditional research methods. Conceptualized within an historical and contemporary socio-political context of turbulence, oppression, and inequity, the aspiration was that ABR might transcend the usual rhetoric exposing the trauma and toxicity while enhancing empathic, compassionate, and meaningful social discourse essential to creative reformative social justice. Thus, the Arts-Based Research (ABR) Global Consortium was formed. With the formation of our consortium and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to begin our first research project “Sustaining Life on Earth: Arts-Based Responses to the Lived Experience of COVID-19”, which was initiated in 2020 and completed in 2022. Nineteen individuals volunteered to participate as co-researchers, alongside the six member core team, submitting their arts-based and narrative responses to the project. The core team guiding the project collected and organized the submissions while simultaneously entering into an immersive, iterative, dynamic arts-based and dialogic process with the data and each other. In these immersive processes, we considered a priori themes of emotional impact, social framing, and aesthetic power of the art and narrative data as well as opening to emergent themes. Analysis included narrative and sensorial-based coding, responsive art making, collaborative and individual multi-genre memos, and reflections on all submissions. The final result of the project is an artsbased and performative piece

The impact of current trends in technology, digitalization and mass media on our global culture raises questions regarding the responsibility and ethics of research decisions in contemporary social and health sciences. Embedded in the dominant paradigms, these trends subtly affect our worldviews, our valuation of the human condition, and the nature of socio-political discourse. In such critical post normal times (SARDAR, 2009) radical imagination (HAIVEN & KHASNABISH, 2014) and epistemic activism, embracing non-dominant modes of knowledge production in the social and health sciences, becomes a necessity. Arts-based research (ABR) is resonant with the onto-epistemological perspectives and methodologies necessary to challenge and disrupt current unilateral and hegemonic paradigms underlying decaying societal and geo-political constructs. In this article, we advocate for the development of a global network of ABR scholars and stakeholders invoking a radical imaginative philosophy and arts-based research methodologies as an approach to social activism and epistemological change.

The paper aims to describe the first findings of my actual research directed to deepen the different characteristics of the term “educational poverty”, drawing a pedagogical perspective on it. Presentation gives importance to the dimensions of inquiry that explicit the characteristics of a collaborative ‘educational community’, where each member can have a strong role in activating educational opportunities for young generations. At first the dissertation gives evidence to the main concepts to describe the phenomenon, especially reconstructing strategies and activities that make possible, in Italy and Europe, to contrast ‘educational poverty’ building a common educative responsibility between adult educators (parents, teachers and social workers) and offering qualitative educational experiences. This theoretical framework includes an exploration of different dimensions of the topic, a broader definition of poverty in terms of possibilities and functioning and the pedagogical proposals, that, traditionally, have found solutions ‘from the bottom’ for poverty and social fragmentations. These concepts are reference points to generate an operative definition of ‘educational poverty’ and its multi-dimensional shape. The paper considers this operationalization and the first findings of an ‘holistic case study’ based on the educative project “Sulla buona strada” and its activities in a disadvantaged area of Genoa city (Italy). This is my actual field of study. The participants are parents, social workers, policy makers, teachers and school managers. Using in depth interviews and focus-group, the research wants to developed a situated and context-sensitive description of the term ‘educational poverty’ and the possible role of participants in contrasting it. Reinforcing the importance to really understand a topic, starting from the concrete experience of people involved into the research, the paper tries to open some questions as: what are the policies that a territorial comm

The research presented in this paper has been designed in order to explore gender in educational services. The aim is not only to identify and focus on stereotypes, naturalization and culturalisation processes and their permanence but also to investigate gender matrix, implicit in the educational interventions as well as in the way practitioners are used to work for and with the users. The purpose is to understand whether and how gender culture influences the definition of educational needs and the structuring, the managing, the evaluation of the educational and social services and the dissemination of their work. At the same time, the goal is to explore the possible resistance and impediments that the proposal to use a critical gender approach could meet in these educational contexts. In the thirty qualitative interviews conducted, participants were invited to explore both gender and educational problems (such as social exclusion, mental disease, disability etc., their educational services are designed for), trying to link them together and to reflect on intersectional understanding of gender and other axes of oppression; where gender is something that is done and not just a neutral biological dimension nor a simple variable. The not taken for granted acquisition of this lens in social and educational services can support practitioners at different levels: to implement educational tools and strategies to analyze and meet the users’ needs and to enhance their capacity to take into account the lived experience of each person and the related different forms of oppression across a particular social context; not to confirm or reproduce mechanisms that create gender disadvantages through their interventions; and to use this knowledge in the interest of social change in developing more gender sensitive educational services and projects. The research and the results presented in this paper are part of a research grant assigned from the Department of Educational Humane Scie

Research in educational and learning studies can not only be theoretical, analytical and descriptive. It has also to be connected with real social and educational experiences, in order to lead the subjects involved in these processes (especially professionals, such as educators, teachers, social workers, etc.) to reflect upon their daily practices and to understand, deconstruct, orient, plan, evaluate, criticize, and theorize them. This implies the need to carry out qualitative inquiry as activism, so as to make the research transformative, situated, positioned, context-sensitive, experience-near and embodied. It is no surprise, therefore, that in the last few decades many types of empirical research have emerged – for instance, participatory action research – with the aim not only to study, but also to change the social and material contexts of education, together with the subjects who experience these contexts every day. Starting from these introductory reflections, the paper intends to present the “Clinica della Formazione”, a particular theoretical-methodological approach to action research, which is still hardly known in the international debate. This approach was developed in the Nineties by the Italian pedagogist and philosopher of education Riccardo Massa, and is currently adopted by quite a few Italian scholars of education. Although the “Clinica della Formazione” grounds on specific and original theoretical categories, some of its epistemological premises and research and training strategies can interact successfully with current reflective perspectives, such as Transformative Learning and Critical Reflection, and with new materialisms and sociomaterial approaches, such as Actor-Network Theory and Activity Theory. In this sense, the most distinctive aspect of the “Clinica della Formazione” is hybridity, that is, the capability to synthetize theorizations and operative strategies belonging to research traditions that are often considered irreconcilable. Thi

Based on the assumption that mental health is fundamental in every man’s and woman’s life (WHO, 2001; UE, 2014), this project focuses on the exploration of educational professionals’ role and practice in order to promote youth (16-24) well-being in an Italian metropolitan area. The project will try to explore modalities/strategies that, either implicitly or informally, teachers and educators set up in their professional environments, in order to promote wellbeing and prevent mental illnesses in the youth. Our hypothesis is that expert educators and teachers have developed a tacit knowledge on recognizing and handling, through educational strategies, those young people that show some initial signs of mental uneasiness, such as social isolation, school drop-out, or aggressive behavior. Therefore, with a better awareness, they can actively act and prevent the growth of disease, either in school or wherever they work, with different levels of awareness, planning their actions as primary preventative interventions. Framed in a qualitative approach, the research follows a phenomenological-hermeneutical method and a case-study strategy. Three cases are selected, in order to involve educational professionals working in various services, located in different areas of a metropolitan city in Northern Italy. The project firstly foresees the involvement of participants in a semi-structured interview. Subsequently, basing on the analysis of interviews, participants will be involved in a meeting in order to share the emerging themes and to discuss about about good educational practices to promote youth well-being. Finally, a document will be written, containing ideas and reflections about the projecting and acting of good educational practices to promote well-being and prevent mental disease in youngsters. Suggestions will be offered about the analysis of interviews, trying to focus on the educational role and practices in order to promote youth well-being.

This article provides a description of the presence of qualitative research in Italian social and organisational psychology. The first section of the article identifies three major phases of qualitative methods and the factors that, from the 1990s, played a major role in their development: the legitimisation of qualitative research in sociology, the rising of theoretical perspectives expressing a critical stance toward the hegemonic quantitative and experimental approach of the discipline, and the demand for qualitative studies from public and private clients. In the second section, we present a review of the scientific articles published in the last five years. Our analysis shows that the health field stands out as having the greatest number of publications, both for social and organizational psychology; the absolute prevalence of the interview as a data collection method; and that Grounded theory, Discourse analysis, and Conversation analysis are the most cited references for data analysis. We discuss these results in relation to the set of rules that regulates the careers of researchers in Italy (and abroad), and to the only partial acceptance of qualitative research in Italian psychology.

This article provides a description of the presence of qualitative research in Italian social and organisational psychology. The first section of the article identifies three major phases of qualitative methods and the factors that, from the 1990s, played a major role in their development: the legitimisation of qualitative research in sociology, the rising of theoretical perspectives expressing a critical stance toward the hegemonic quantitative and experimental approach of the discipline, and the demand for qualitative studies from public and private clients. In the second section, we present a review of the scientific articles published in the last five years. Our analysis shows that the health field stands out as having the greatest number of publications, both for social and organizational psychology; the absolute prevalence of the interview as a data collection method; and that Grounded theory, Discourse analysis, and Conversation analysis are the most cited references for data analysis. We discuss these results in relation to the set of rules that regulates the careers of researchers in Italy (and abroad), and to the only partial acceptance of qualitative research in Italian psychology.