2025 Verona – Keynote Speakers

Abstract: The theory of transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991; Formenti & West, 2018) states that dilemmas are a necessary experience for adults to become aware of the limits of their doing and thinking, and develop new perspectives of meaning, identities, and actions. Educational work in services for families and children entails dilemmas between the known and unknown, the present and possible futures, professionals’ authority and parents’ capacitation. The relationship with vulnerable parents, then, becomes a learning occasion when emerging dilemmas are recognized, named, and leveraged to transform each other’s presuppositions. The position of an “unknowing expert” allows empowering parents as adults who can take responsibilities and use their epistemic and relational power in constructive ways. The concept and practice of “jointly created authority” (Watson, 2019), based on differentiating power, can help to support conversations where adults share their responsibilities towards children.

Bio: Prof. dr. Laura Formenti, full professor in General and Social Pedagogy, teaches “Family Pedagogy” and “Family Counselling: Theories and Practices” at the University of Milano Bicocca, Department of Human Sciences for Education «Riccardo Massa». She is the Director of a Master on “Residential child care and its landscapes: a systemic educational model”, based on the collaboration of family, child protection agencies, schools, and local communities. In her research on family pedagogy, she is especially interested in the dynamic evolution of relationships, their constraints and possibilities, and how narrative and material factors interact in the construction of family cultures, identities, scripts, and sense of belonging. Her work focuses on the education and learning of adults – parents, teachers, professionals in education, social work and health – with an ecosystemic critical approach, practice-oriented and transformative. She uses ethnographic and narrative methods with a critical interpretative framework and participatory action research to support transformative learning beyond individuals, to support the evolution of families, groups, and organisations as complex systems. 

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Abstract: The Intervention Program for the Prevention of Institutionalization (P.I.P.P.I.) represents a comprehensive, public initiative developed by the Laboratory for Research and Intervention in Family Education, formally adopted by the Italian Ministry of Labour and Social Policies since 2011, recognised among Italy’s first six Livelli Essenziali di Prestazioni Sociali (LEPS), in the 2022 Budget Law. Grounded in principles of social justice and through its emphasis on community-institutional collaboration, P.I.P.P.I. addresses social family’s isolation while implementing four integrated intervention modalities providing intensive support: (a) home- and community-based education, (b) parent-child group activities, (c) institutional partnerships (daycare/schools/social services), and (d) community solidarity networks.The presentation focuses on the intervention of institutional partnerships, where Social Service operators, families, educators and teachers work together to prevent the impact of vulnerability on children’s development, with a shared method and tools. Starting from theoretical references, the presentation highlights some emerging practices, active in different parts of Italy.

Bio: Prof. dr. Paola Milani, full professor of Social Pedagogy, winner of the ITWIIN Award for Women Inventors and Innovators in 2018, for the category Capacity building, P.I. of the Laboratory of Research and Intervention in Family Education of the University of Padua and of the Intervention Programme To Prevent Institutionalisation -P.I.P.P.I.-, the largest funded Programme in the history of social policies in Italy for the prevention of family vulnerability, thanks to an institutional partnership with the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies. P.I.P.P.I., defined in 2021 as one of the first 6 Essential Levels of Social Benefits (LEPS), was awarded as the best project in the area of inequality reduction (goal 10) at the «Sustainable Public Administration Award – 2nd Edition. Agenda 2030» and won the European Social Network Award 2019 as the first European project for the Methods and Tools section. Author of more than 250 national and international scientific publications, including Educazione e famiglie. Ricerche e nuove pratiche per la genitorialità (Education and Families. Research and new practices for parenting), Carocci, which won the Italian Society of Academic Pedagogy national prize for the best pedagogical monograph of 2019 and Nelle stanze dei bambini alle nove della sera. Contrastare e prevenire le inuguaglianze sociali (In the children’s rooms at nine o’clock in the evening. Counteracting and preventing social inequalities), Erickson, Trento, which won the Riccardo Massa Prize at the University of Milan Bicocca in 2022.

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Abstract: What are the legacies of family and power which inform our present-day environments? How do these narratives work to enable or inhibit participation, and to amplify or silence voices? This talk challenges well-worn theories which covertly or overtly apportion blame to individuals and groups through the notion of family deficit. Narratives of legacy – including writing by Zora Neale Hurston and Virginia Woolf – will be invoked to illuminate on the ways in which racialised and gendered bodies have been normalised or rendered alien, and to suggest at the present-day consequences. Creative writing has served as means of interrupting dominant narratives which determine who is ‘normal’ and who is ‘Other’ and therefore, out of place. It is proposed here that (re)writing the self can function as an important means of critical space-making.

Bio: Prof. dr. Claire Hynes is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, in the UK. She writes fiction, creative non-fiction, essays and theatre monologues. Her writing has appeared in publications including Wasafiri journal of international contemporary writing, the Bath Short Story Award Anthology, What the Water Gave Us anthology, Lighthouse literary journal and Tangled Roots anthology. Her theatre monologues have been performed at the Contact Theatre in Manchester. Claire has been selected as an international Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellow for 2025-26. She was a winner of the Commonword monologue writing competition (2016), and she has been listed for the Bath Short Story Award (2014) and commended in the Words and Women “about” monologue competition (2014). She presented and co-wrote the BBC World Service documentary «My Granny, The Slave» in connection with her creative writing research (2022). Claire previously worked as a film-maker and she was the news editor for the Black British newspaper, The Voice.

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