Despite the increasing popularity of Global Citizenship Education (GCE), its meaning is complex and ambiguous (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016), this implies concepts that tend to remain vague and abstract, especially hard to clearly translate in educational practices. A great number of reviews conceptualize the different approaches developed in this field (Oaxley and Morris, 2013; Goren & Yemini 2017); they define the existing typologies of GCE and their relevance. Through these they show that the perduring of different and contrasting approaches tends to minimize the strong impact that GCE should have in educational discourses. GCE has been criticized for its failure to address neo-liberal agendas and economic growth models. The sharpest criticism from a post-colonial view has been raised by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (Andreotti 2006; Andreotti & Stein, 2016) and others (Abdi, Shultz, & Pillay, 2015). She claims that due to the lack of critical analysis of power relations and global inequalities, GCE often results in educational practices that unintentionally reproduce and reinforce an ethnocentric, ahistorical, paternalistic approach (Andreotti & Stein, 2016). In a recent article Pashby and others (2020) suggest an ontological re-evaluation of GCE that has to start from the persistent western colonial systems’ imaginaries. Given these premises, the first important issue involved is the stratification of discourses around citizenship and globalization. The research design starts form a preliminary discourse analysis (Foucault, 1970; Clark, 2005) of citizenship as a notion (Faggioli, 2021). This critical review reveals the exclusion of the lived body in the evolution of citizenship concept. This forgetfulness can generate paradoxical and problematic meanings operating in opposite and tangled ways, and also identifies a disembodiment device culturally developed and embedded in globalization processes (Faggioli, 2021). This trend is also detectable in educational approaches which tend to underestimate the embodied experience, particularly in the passage from theoretical knowledge to action (VanderDussen Tokan, 2018). Rethinking the lived body contribution (Tarozzi & Francesconi, 2019) could provide different tools able to recompose Western dichotomies (Gabrielson & Parady, 2010, Prokhovnik, 2014) and educational models.

Starting from this critical framework, the research is therefore directed to collect qualitative data on the role of embodiment in acquisition of attitudes and skills of Global Citizenship. It includes a bottom-up method, grounded in the experiences of subjects who are already active in global movements. Following UNESCO’s definition (2015) Global Citizenship Education (GCE) promotes a sense of belonging to the global community emphasizing political, economic, social and cultural interdependency and interconnectedness between the local, the national and the global. Such definition should be consistent with a holistic theory of knowledge. The present work tries to highlight how the phenomenological notion of lived body could contribute to rethink the Global Citizenship educational frameworks with a theory of knowledge that- deconstructing the Western imaginaries- could merge the various human dimensions and deliver objectives consistent with a radical GCE approach. This framework could be helpful to compare educational models including perspectives from the Global South.

The project – with a critical posture shaped on the disembodiment device analysed above- delimits the research question within the framework of the relationships between corporeity (as defined in phenomenology and Embodied Education) and the acquisition of global citizenship skills. The idea is to try to grasp relevant elements in the formation of experience where such training is already evident and deepen the data in a specific educational context. The complexity of the processes involved- GC skills and attitude developing- leads to a several-stages method, then to a Mix Method Research (QUAL-qual) as defined by Morse and Niehaus (Morse & Niehaus, 2016). The core research is qualitative with Grounded Theory collection and analysis of data (Tarozzi, 2020; Charmaz 2014) carried by intensive interviews (Charmaz, 2014) addressed to young activists (18, 19 years old). Due to the pandemic emergency the interviews are conducted online and usually last 40 minutes. The data are analysed with MAXQDA but, to avoid excessive mechanical coding, with a constant rereading of the original transcriptions (Tarozzi, 2020). The core research will conduct to a medium-range theory of lived experience in global citizenship education, with a focus on the body dimension. Then, in a supplementary level of research, that has yet to begin, the categories emerged will be compared with a qualitative analysis of data collected in an ethnographic observation of a specific educational context (NGO voluntaries camp). The data collected in this second level of research will be analysed with GT (Bove, 2009a) procedures.

The current state of research, within the open coding of about 5 deep interviews (that will be almost 10 in April), suggests some interesting elements that can lead to a focalized coding and to a theoretical sampling. First of all, it is already possible to observe that the youths interviewed tend to represent their decision to act and their first participation, as a result of the desire to associate with other boys and girls of the same age, in order to feel part of an inclusive and dynamic group with a strong sense of efficacy. The second interesting element emerged from the occurrences of numerous codes is that strong experiences, that at first destabilise their previous ideas and feelings, function as triggers. In these elements the role of the body is mostly implied and express with some occurrences as “touch with your hands” “feel unbalanced”, “breathing adrenaline” etc. Then, the purpose sampling will be fulfilled with about 15 interviews, or more depending on the coding processes, in order to saturate the categories emerged. Secondly, GT focalized and theoretic coding, would allow to construct a shortrange theory, with emergent categories and relations, from which it should be possible to better define the role of the lived body in these processes. Moreover, as Mix-Method demands, it will be possible to enter in this signification with a deeper level of research, observing a specific educational context where the body dimension is included. The categories emerged from the different levels of research may be useful for further comparisons with GCE objectives – including Global South perspectives- and curricula and may emphasize novel strategies. In addition, they could contribute to designing educational syllabuses, which would be object of further research.

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