Introduzione: saperi e pratiche decoloniali

How does Italian public university tackle past and current racism in Italy? An extraordinary amount of academic research has been dedicated to these topics in the last decades, but how do Italian public institutions of higher education deal with the global decolonizing turn, major demographic changes, political and cultural demands of racialized groups and anti-racist movements to transform theoretical and methodological approaches, curricula and canons, or to open up the teaching body in order to break its dominant whiteness? The seminars organized in Macerata and Modena and Reggio Emilia Universities (2021-22 and 2022-23) introduced in the credit system issues related to racism, antiracism and decoloniality significantly silenced both in the mainstream public debate and core-curriculum, interrogating them with independent scholars, activists, school and university teachers and students. FES 12 MONOGRAPHIC NUMBER publishes some of the seminars’s interventions and three additional contributions, investigating the fascist and post-fascist anti-Gypsyism of Guido Landra; biopolitics of race, gender and citizenship in the recent Italian political ‘progressive’ discourse; the anti-racist potential of domestic reception and co-housing between white Italians and refugees; the ‘fabrication’ of Gypsies through segregationist policies against Roma in Italy; the imbrication and reproduction of racist and sexist violence in Macerata’s terroristic attack (2018) through Luca Traini’s performance of Italian whiteness (2018); the transversal spread of Great replacement theories in Italy and their operative intertwining of racism and sexism; the gap between anti-racist and decolonial projects and the real democratization of the university; the death of Alika Ogorchukwu (2022) as result of both racist and abilist violence against a Black, disabled body.