PEA
Call for Proposals

Third International Conference

PEA – Pedagogy, Ecology and the Arts

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"power"

community — school — relationships — biopolitics — education 

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4-5-6 September 2025, Meran-o, South Tyrol, Italy

 

 

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to the second international conference PEA – Pedagogy, Ecology and the Arts in Meran-o, Italy. The conference will be hosted by the Academy of Italian-German Studies and the Centre for Culture and will be held in three languages (English, German and Italian). It is organised as a convivial space and will bring together researchers and practitioners on forms of educational dialogue, particularly between the German and Italian-speaking regions, but will also be open to other international and intercultural experiences.

PEA explores pedagogy in an ecological dimension as a link between humans and nature, in which the arts can initiate an effective synthesis.

The three topics underpinning the conference are:
●    Pedagogy: education is the focus of the conference, especially in its inclusive, empowering and developmental sense.
●    Ecology: ecological thinking implies a systemic perspective of education that connects experiences, lives and systems (places, institutions, classrooms…).
●    Arts: we aim for a qualitative inquiry that incorporates artistic processes and creativity into the experiential-aesthetic dimension to understand and articulate the inter-subjectivity of human experience.
 

Theme of the 2025 Conference

In contemporary times, power — even in narratives — increasingly appears to be an end in itself. Politics, rather than being understood as the organization of power in service of promoting rights, tends instead to function as a tool for the concentration of power itself. Within this framework, learning environments and schools — institutions tasked with the formation of citizens — reflect a growing ambivalence: education is often seen more as a means of control and adaptation than as a space for emancipation, advancement, and evolution, particularly with regard to fundamental and universal rights. The dominant educational paradigm, developed through modern liberal democracies from the Enlightenment and later shaped by the national — and even nationalistic — fervor of Romanticism, is now undergoing a clear crisis. The explicit resurgence of global imperialism and the claims of regional and local powers have accompanied the decline of Eurocentric and Western perspectives, a fall that is not only etymological (in Latin West is occidens, meaning “where the sun sets” - (where it falls). One of Heraclitus’ fragments reads, “Polemos is the father of all things”, attributing to conflictthe driving force behind change and harmony in the universe, where opposing wills and powers inevitably clash in a “dialectic of opposites”. Drawing from this vision - where the fire of the Logos is life - Idealism and Materialism have drawn inspiration to imagine rational progress, a dialectic in which reason manifests itself, extends beyond, expands the limits.
While this side of the limit, the Will — to live and to power — with Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, seeks to integrate the rationalist drift by returning to a spatial or temporal origin: the East or the birth of tragedy. The critical approach – particularly that of Jacques Derrida – deconstructs our relationship with the logos as the power or authority of presence, the historical subordination of writing to speech from Plato to Husserl: logocentrism. For Michel Foucault, power is omnipresent; it manifests in all social interactions through knowledge, discourses, narratives — forming power-knowledge systems. Biopolitics describes how modern power is exercised over life and bodies, regulating health, sexuality, birth rates, and other biological aspects of populations. School, in this framework, becomes a disciplinary and surveillance apparatus — a set of techniques designed to control and regulate behavior. However, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, “no one has the right to obey”. Lorenzo Milani declared, “obedience is no longer a virtue.” Paulo Freire sees education as a tool for liberation and conscientization. For Antonio Gramsci, politics is knowledge, and knowledge is politics. In Ubuntu philosophy — “I am because we are” — power exists and is enacted through relationship, interaction, and interdependence. It becomes a shared responsibility for the common good (Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela). From a decolonial perspective, we move beyond imposed uniformity and colonial hierarchies to embrace a multiplicity, a coexistence, of ‘marginalized’ voices, knowledges, practices, and ways of being (Franz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa). Feminist approaches challenge domination (power over) and instead promote power with/from/for — understood as capacity, empowerment, agency, and collective transformation (Judith Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Luce Irigaray, Verónica Gago). Should we open ourselves to a plurality of human experiences, redefining a meaningful horizon in which borders represent possibilities, connections, maps — or instead retreat into or reinforce a dichotomous vision of “humanity” versus “barbarism”? Should power be conceived as domination (power over the people) or as shared potential (power with/to the people)? In educational contexts, both formal and informal, is power a means or an end? Is it a form of injustice, or a structural dimension of reality? Should it be resisted, dismantled, or wisely managed? Can power ever be just? And what might a world without power even look like?
The PEA 2025 Conference “power” will take these very questions as its starting point, embracing their complexity in order to develop an ecological perspective on the theme ofpower in education. Within this view, the arts offer an inspiring model for a pedagogy as art: a patient, textile-like practice, in which the knots of a web are interwoven, a network made of creative experiences and meaningful relationships. The artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, guest of the "polis" edition of PEA, spoke of a "demopractic" dimension - rather than a "democratic" one - in which praxis (doing) replaces kratos (power), and demos (the people) becomes organized horizontally rather than vertically.
The conference will therefore welcome — across the broad fields of pedagogy, education, training, community work, and mediation — research, experiences, practices, projects, and reflections animated by this creative and vital spirit, aimed at reinforcing community, social engagement, and personal growth.
At PEA Conference 2025 “power” we invite participants to reflect on the necessary and fruitful, positive and negative aspects of power in the various spheres of human life and society. The goal is to identify well-founded interpretative and action-oriented pathways — rooted i.e. grounded in a meaningful horizon — through themes including, but not limited to:

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• Power in the classroom and in schools

• Control in education and learning

• Approaches to power: paternalism, nudging, caring, distributed power, anarchy

• Empowerment

• Ethics and power, or the ethics of power

• Art and power, politics, aesthetics

• Power and human rights

• Powers, awareness, consciousness

• Sustainability and power

• Dematerialization of knowledge, digitalization and power

• The power of emotions and feelings, between promotion and manipulation

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Possible contributions may include: finalised research projects, ongoing research (including PhD and post-doctoral research), professional experience, theoretical and practical contributions. Contributions from learning environments, schools, professional educators and educational agencies are particularly welcome.

Types of proposals
●    Individual papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes Q & A)
●    Workshops (40 minutes + 20 minutes Q & A)

Key dates:
●    Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 June 2025
●    Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2025
●    Early bird registration:  30 June – 15 July 2025
●    Basic registration: 16 – 30 July 2025
●    PEA conference: 4-5-6 September 2025
●    Submission of complete contributions for publication: 15 December 2025

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS
1.    The deadline for submissions is JUNE 15, 2025
2.    Abstract(s) may only be submitted via this form.
3.    Abstract(s) must include:
○    a title, limited to 20 words
○    full name, institution and email address of all authors
○    3 to 5 keywords
○    a text not exceeding 400 words, excluding title and references
○    references
4. Acceptance will be notified via email by 30 June. Upon notification of acceptance, lead authors will be invited to pay their conference fee and register on the conference platform. Co-authors of accepted abstracts attending the conference are also required to pay the conference fee.
5. Abstracts must be in English. PPT/PDF presentations must also be in English. Multilingual options may be accepted for the oral presentationmay be admitted for the oral presentation, according to convenors’ preferences.
6. All abstracts will be published in the PEA – Conference Book of Abstracts prior to the conference.
7. Participants will have the opportunity to develop their accepted abstracts into full papers if they pass the review process. The book, edited by the conference organisers, will be published in Open Access (ISNB and DOI). Contributions must be submitted in Italian, German or English, the languages of the conference.

 

Fees for participation in the conference (including coffee breaks and snacks; lunch and dinner are not included)

●   School teachers, educators, artists, civil society, free researchers (speakers)    

Early bird (30 June – 15 July 2025): 100 €

Basic (16 – 30 July 2025): 130 €
●   Academics (speakers)

Early bird (from 16 – 30 June 2025): 150 €

Basic (from 1 – 30 July 2025): 190 €
●   Students, school teachers, educators… (listeners only)    

Free participation (except meals and coffee breaks)
subject to registration confirmed by the organisers (info@peaconference.org)    

Location and Organization
The venues for the PEA conference: Villa San Marco at 1 Innerhofer Street in Meran-o, which has been home to the Academy of Italian-German Studies since 1949 and to EUPHUR – Euregio Platform for Human Dignity and Human Rights since 2016. Another venue for workshops and events is the nearby Centre for the Culture at 1 Cavour Street, which has been home to the Centre for Research in Arts and Theater CRAT since 2010.
Other events and presentations may take place at different locations in the city of Meran-o and will be announced in the final programme.
 
Further information can be obtained via the conference website: www.peaconference.org

For all other questions, please contact info@peaconference.org