Close-ups

Let’s talk about you: what is your background, what do you teach, and what are your research interests?
My name is Inès Giunta and I come from a land - Sicily - which is impossible to describe simply as a place of origin: Sicily gets under your skin with all its marvellous contradictions, and when you finally realise that you have chosen it, not by birth right but by sense of belonging, you realise that it possesses you. You are, inevitably, island and continent, lava and sea, horizon and border. I think this is how I got interested in complexity. First analysed during a short but intense experience as a journalist on the front line in the fight against Mafia, as an interpretation of a reality that could produce poetic ways of living dramatically interrupted by bloody and criminal events. Then, once I understood that education is the antidote to any deviation (human, even more than political and social), I investigated it as a constitutive aspect of Pedagogy as a science and as a distinctive feature of its object.

Tell us about your academic path.
Seen from an academic perspective, mine is a story in reverse. Or perhaps it is just a story that has followed its own logic. Once I graduated, I was offered a job as an assistant at the University of Palermo, but in the meantime my husband had been transferred to Catania and I willingly gave it up to give priority to my family. I returned to work when I thought the time was ripe to focus on what I felt was pressing: hence the PhD in Fundamentals and Methods of Educational Processes, the long cooperation with the chair of Pedagogy, the teaching contracts and the publications. Then a severe health problem and a new year-long break, just as the (long-awaited) selection for a researcher in my field was coming out. It's hard to get back in. And equally difficult to give up. And just when I was about to give up, I entered the competition as a fixed-term researcher at Ca' Foscari, a prestigious institution and an important reference during my student years, to which I am bound by a deep feeling of respect and gratitude. An act of courage. An act of love.

What are your professional references?
My references have definitely been Umberto Margiotta and Massimiliano Costa, who gave us an idea of education that goes beyond the emphasis on learning and imposes itself, instead, as an intersubjective practice of co-generation of value that concerns the being and becoming of the human being in a deeper and more radical way than any other field of action we experience. An idea in which I see the beginning of a (necessary) human blooming.

What are you most passionate about in your research?
The idea (and perhaps the hope) that a way of thinking capable of connecting and expressing solidarity with knowledge can be extended into an ethic of interconnection and solidarity among humans.