[WORKSHOP] 🚩 D.00. Learning on the Margins: Early School Leaving, Educational Inequalities and the Politics of Place

In recent years, early school leaving has re-emerged as a key indicator of the deep social and territorial inequalities shaping urban life. Its persistence in the metropolitan peripheries of Italy reflects not only the limits of the educational system but also the changing relationship between school, territory, and citizenship. As research on spatial and educational inequalities has shown (Benadusi & Giancola, 2016; Wacquant, 2008), peripheral areas are not merely geographic spaces but social formations where exclusion, stigma, and institutional weakness converge, affecting both access to and the quality of education.

Schools located in such contexts often act as welfare institutions of last resort, compensating for fragile family networks and weakened public infrastructures (Ballarino & Checchi, 2006). This generates a growing tension between the educational and the social mandates of schooling—one that risks overburdening educators while narrowing the school’s emancipatory potential.

The Workshop explores this tension from a sociological and policy perspective, analyzing how early school leaving is defined and governed within contexts of urban marginality. It focuses on three key questions:

1. how spatial segregation and territorial deprivation affect educational trajectories;

2. how schools, often stigmatized or isolated, can become spaces of civic resistance and social innovation;

3. which forms of multi-level governance—linking institutions, the third sector, and local educational communities—can sustain inclusive and democratic education in fragile territories.

Drawing on the case of Rome’s VI Municipality, the project BELLA! Fateci spazio (promoted by ActionAid International Italia ETS) and IREF - Istituto di Ricerche Educative e Formative) offers an empirical lens on the interplay between inequality, school orientation, and educational wellbeing. The findings feed a broader reflection: school dropout is not merely an individual failure but a structural manifestation of territorial injustice (Dubet, 2011), calling into question the capacity of democratic systems to guarantee both the right to education and social cohesion.

The Workshop, held in Italian, builds on the participatory learning process promoted through ActionAid’s educational inequalities programme, and invites a transdisciplinary dialogue between empirical research, public policy, and civic engagement to reimagine educational justice policy in peripheral urban contexts.

Workshop agenda (provisional titles)

Chair: Claudia Cicciotti (ActionAid Italia), Luca Fanelli (ActionAid Italia), Gianfranco Zucca (IREF)

1. Introduction – Education, Territory and Democracy: Why Early School Leaving Is a Political Issue
   Claudia Cicciotti (ActionAid Italia) and Gianfranco Zucca (IREF)
2. Learning on the Margins: Educational Inequalities and School Trajectories in Rome’s VI Municipality
   Leonardo Piromalli (IREF), Sabina Licursi (University of Calabria), and Emanuela Pascuzzi (University of Calabria)
3. Building Educational Communities in Fragile Territories. Local Policies and the Multi-Level Governance of Early School Leaving
   MariaSole Piccioli (ActionAid Italia), Claudia Pratelli (Municipality of Rome - Councilor for Education, Training, and Employment), and Federico Neri (Scaro Community)
4. Roundtable. Beyond Early School Leaving: Educational Justice, New Forms of Citizenship and Policy Recommendations
   Fabrizio Barca (Forum Disuguaglianze e Diversità), Giuseppina Jose Mangione (INDIRE), Marco Rossi-Doria (Con I Bambini ETS - to be confirmed), and Katia Scannavini (ActionAid Italia)