On December 12th 2024, the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures of the University of Genoa (UNIGE) hosted a day-long event to introduce ARENAS to teachers and school students from across Italy.
The morning session consisted of an interactive in-person lesson with over 120 students from 4 different schools in the Liguria region. This session was led by ARENAS consortium member, Nora Gattiglia, post-doc researcher from UNIGE. The topics addressed in this session were:
- Extremist hate speech: how to recognise it (focus on linguistic traits).
- Reparation discourses: institutional campaigns on gender violence.
- Counter-narratives: alternative campaigns on gender violence.
In the afternoon Stefano Vicari, Associate Professor in French Linguistics at UNIGE, led an online session with secondary school teachers from 7 different schools across Italy. This session was delivered in Italian but examined data from both Italy and France. The feedback from participants was very positive, with one teacher commenting “I will continue this work with my students and share their work with ARENAS”.
The teachers who attended were enthusiastic and the students were very attentive and willing to share their opinions. Speaking after the event Nora Gattiglia commented, “Thanks to the dialogue with students, I was able to focus on some things that were important to their eyes, such as the way colours contribute to framing the communication. The age difference made me think of the hard way you gain experiential knowledge on gender discrimination and oppression, and how it is crucial for students to develop their own perspective on that, and their own tools of resistance. I believe that a part in this can be played by a critical and informed reflection of how language works and is made to work”.
