A Discourse Analysis of Italian School Policy on Convivenza, Citizenship, and Intercultura

• In Event: Conceptualizing Convivencia in Formal and Nonformal Education Spaces Internationally

Abstract

In recent Italian education policy, the term convivenza appears in relation to citizenship education, intercultural education, and anti-bullying efforts. With the school recognized by the Ministry of Instruction, University, and Research (MIUR) in Italy as an ideal “laboratory for convivenza and new citizenship,” this paper traces the shifting borders of Italian belonging fabricated in policies and best practices for civic, citizenship, and intercultural education.

I rely primarily on Kristeva’s work with the process of abjection. While Kristeva tends to focus on the individual (the exile, the foreigner, the stranger), I use her work with the discourses and practices that fabricate a collective “We” (such as “We Italians”), which includes the child. Kristeva (1982) writes that the process of abjection is the maintenance of a coherent identity and thus the objectification of one’s borders, bringing out their historical arbitrariness and demand for recursive maintenance. The process of abjection re-draws the borders of the collective home not only through exclusion, but through internal exclusions by creating those who are yet-to-be-integrated, or those who threaten the historical coherency of “us” if not integrated.

The rules by which such exclusions and abjections are given sense is described by Popkewitz (2008) as “particular rules and standards of ‘thought’ as though they represent a universal condition of humanity” (Popkewitz, 2006). This use envisions a plurality of variously scaled cosmopolitanisms in that the assemblage of Enlightenment principles and values intersects with particular times and places to constitute different grids of intelligibility.

Drawing data from Italian ministerial documents, scholarly work, and lawpaper, I explore how the discourse of convivenza in Italian education policy seeks to not include in its call for collaboration and solidarity, excluding through a process of abjection in the (re)fabrication of the Italian student/citizen. I use historical discourse analysis to trace shifting assemblage of relationships, texts, and practices that make the national-educative project of Italian convivenza. I show how power is deployed through knowledge as a social practice that both invites and excludes participation related to the discursive construction of being/being recognized (Foucault, 1980). Such work gives recognition to the way policy not only refers to future “ideal” students or situations, but frames present ways of thinking about who or what is a “problem” and how that problem might be solved.

Education for convivenza is not only meant to ensure peace, solidarity, and responsibility/rule of law, but to tame the uncertainties of democracy and immigration through the fabrication standards of action and participation. These standards produce the child who threatens convivenza, identified as the object of pedagogical intervention and rescue; the rescue of the child outside of the norms of convivenza is also the rescue of Italian belonging in schools populated by generations of “new Italians” (MIUR, n.d.). This paper makes visible the current limits in thinking by identifying the system of reasoning that shapes reflection and action in the naming of people and practices within policy.

Author

• Jamie A. Kowalczyk, Concordia University - Chicago