Difference is Scary: Education as a Counter to Violence and for the Promotion of a Culture of Otherness. Number 1/2025
Posted on 2024-05-28
Issue Editor: Isabella Loiodice, Anna Grazia Lopez
That difference is scary appears evident in the stabilization of a culture of hatred and violence—physical and psychological, material and symbolic, verbal and visual—often consumed in private but then spread globally through the Web. The many faces of difference—gender, age, ethnic, cultural, and social affiliation, psychophysical condition—are often transformed into occasions for the exercise of violence (material and/or symbolic) against those who diverge from the canonical models of human representation: women with respect to men; children and adolescents with respect to adults; immigrants with respect to natives; the differently abled with respect to the so-called norm, thus becoming privileged targets of a culture of hatred that knows no boundaries. In some recent statistics related to the global map of intolerance, women rank first, followed by people with disabilities, confirming the persistence of stereotypes and prejudices despite many battles fought over the years for the protection of rights to difference.
From a pedagogical point of view, how can we resist violence and persist in action against it, and indeed expand its power and spread through education in the multiplicity of places of life and experience? How can we "enter" the mechanisms of construction of stereotypes and prejudices to try to deconstruct them, opposing them with logics and practices of real knowledge and mutual understanding?
In delving into the theory and practice of the construct of difference (identifying and deepening one of its various forms), the authors are asked to argue about the real possibilities of rewriting the relationships between genders, cultures, ages, psychophysical differences with new rules, investigating and proposing forms, languages, contexts through which educational action can work towards the pedagogical utopia of respect and recognition of all forms of otherness.
Submission of proposals (through the Journal's OJS platform only): October 15, 2025 Publication: December 2025