The fulfilment of the Human Rights of women is still lagging in Europe. Discrimination on the grounds of gender and sex remains widespread and has been further exacerbated by the economic crisis and ensuing austerity measures adopted in some European States, which have impacted on women disproportionately (COE, 2023). Recognising that intersectionality refers to a situation in which several grounds of discrimination (based on i.e. gender, colour, socio-economic status, age, migrant background, or disability) operate and interact with each other in a way that is inseparable and produces specific types of oppression, many women face intersecting inequalities in the European countries and intersectional policies cannot be implemented without centring racialised people (UE, 2023). European guidelines underline the need to recognise how racialised women are at a heightened risk of violence and how intersecting forms of discrimination exacerbate the consequences of gender-based inequalities, including due to the persisting biases and stereotypes.
Within the current international debate that calls for action to reduce inequalities (ONU, 2015) and to promote spaces for dialogue in our complex societies (Besley&Peters, 2012), our research project “Female voices, plural perspectives” (Authors, 2023) intends to open a perspective which is less explored in the intercultural educational discourse. It aims to engage women with a migrant background that are active constructors of relationships and positive actions in family and social-educational contexts and create safe meeting spaces, where they can take the floor and overturn the stereotypes and prejudices that accompany the representations and the educational interventions often aimed at them.
Following this direction, our project wants to promote the visibility of these women from diasporas in our multicultural societies, by highlighting their contribution in innovation-making professional roles and in countering discrimination and harassment and by analysing bias, stereotypical representations and missing representations in educational and social services.
By crossing their stories, we recognise the crucial role of racialised women in the changing process of Italian educational contexts and promoting equality, gender equality, respect, awareness-raising, non-discrimination, intercultural sensitivity and inclusiveness in social systems.
In the frame of critical, feminist, and decolonial pedagogy studies (Ngũgi, 1986; hook, 1990; Adichie, 2006), we would like to create a space where to encourage storytelling, recognize the educational value of these women's experience, and foster the processes of speaking out. Listening to and entering into dialogue with these women's voices can allow us to educate ourselves to a plural gaze and to cultivate narratives for a more inclusive and equal society.

This project requires the choice of a methodological approach sensitive to the encounter with otherness and capable of unhinging an ethno-centric research perspective, by adopting a non-binary and non-static vision of identities as well as putting the researcher “in relation” and “in dialogue on an equal footing” with other voices. Thus, in order to give back to the women interviewed the right and power to narrate their version of individual and collective history, we developed a qualitative research employing professional life history (Goodson & Sikes, 2001) as a core method. As already experimented in other research (Scheffler 1991, Riessman, 2008; Wolcott, 1994; Gobbo, 2004, 2017), the emphasis on narratives and stories is peculiar to an intercultural discourse (Bhatti et al., 2007) which, by making the voice of researcher’s interlocutors heard, provides access to how people understand themselves, develop and interpret events in their professional and personal lives, and express their point of view. Such a research approach has its roots in the reflections developed by the sociology of deviance, the feminist movement, and the anthropology of education, which are inspired by the concepts of agency and social protagonism and recognised in narrative methods the opportunity of rendering justice, legitimacy and dignity to often unspoken realities, like racial, social and gender discrimination. Over the course of one year, we have encountered many women with a migrant background actively working in the socio-educational field (as teachers in school; cultural mediators; project managers in extra-school contexts; educators in advocacy activities for other women; journalists and writers committed to educational social justice issues) in Turin, North of Italy, and the surrounding area. We conducted twenty in-depth interviews. These conversations started with a question-stimulus and then investigated in more depth some thematic areas, such as: the motivations, underlying values and objectives of professional project of these women; the transformation of their own professional role; the stereotypes and discriminations that emerge in their own working contexts and the strategies they implemented to deal with those; how and to what extent their own experience as women comes into play at the intersection of ethnic group belonging, personal history and professional role. The interviews were analysed for recurring themes and patterns, according to the principles of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 2009), taking care to identify the singularity and uniqueness of each personal path.

Through the voices of some of these women, we highlight how they construct their complex professional identities in relation to situated contexts in an original way. Starting from their experience “on the margins” (hooks, 1990) as women, mothers, members of a certain ethnic group and social class, professionals engaged in care and education, they put themselves back “at the centre” by becoming promoters of educational and social innovations, without giving up any of their identity dimensions. In the attempt to re-create spaces of equity and fight against discrimination, they take back the right to imagine themselves differently (Appiah, 1996). By doing so, they prompted the people they work with to imagine themselves as complex persons and often disrupted (at least a little) an predetermined social and political order. These women offer an unprecedented position from which to articulate knowledge and give meaning to the world, challenging educational research to go beyond dominant discourses and calling on the researchers to re-position themselves as women, educational professionals, and activists. Thus, entering into dialogue with these women becomes an opportunity to create a space for intercultural conversation between researchers, communities and institutions and construct new personal and collective stories.

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