Conference Agenda

Bullying is a pressing concern in global education and public health agendas (see United Nations, 2024). Anti-bullying policy began to emerge as a part of curriculum policy worldwide in the late 1990s (Espelage, 2016), and since then, educational systems have been tasked with implementing policies. International organizations have been actively addressing the issue through policy frameworks aimed at reducing school bullying and promoting youth well-being (see UNESCO, 2019; OECD, 2020). In an increasingly globalized world, bullying can no longer be understood as a localized or school-bound phenomenon. Its forms, meanings, and effects extend across borders and social contexts, necessitating coordinated responses at global and regional levels.

Bullying, which is commonly defined as repeated, intentional, and aggressive behavior towards someone with an imbalance of power (Olweus, 1978), is regarded as a public health problem and one of the main challenges to students’ adjustment, well-being, and school functioning (Huang & Cornell, 2015). Early research on bullying emerged primarily within the field of psychology (Thornberg, 2015) and largely continued along this path, framing bullying as a behavioral problem of specific individuals (Walton, 2011). While bullying is mainly defined as an individual problem in research and policy, it is also a socially constructed phenomenon rooted in discursive practices, emerging from a complex network of institutional, historical, social, and political relations (Walton, 2005). However, the dominant individualistic framing largely overlooks the social and political contexts in which anti-bullying policies are developed (see Smith, 2011).

Building on the scholarly debates that highlight tensions between individual-focused explanations and structural perspectives (Walton, 2015), this study argues that bullying is beyond an individual/behavioral problem and approaches it as a systemic issue. Although bullying occurs between individuals, it reflects broader societal patterns through what Thornberg (2015) calls the co-construction of differentness. Therefore, each bullying incident is rooted in and influenced by larger social dynamics and power structures (Walton, 2005). This study offers a critical re-examination of global policy discourses on bullying to open up new conceptual and political possibilities.

Theoretically, the research is grounded in Foucault’s concepts of discourse (1972), governmentality (1991), and subjectification (1973) and seeks to answer how bullying is problematized within international organizations’ policy documents. Ellwood and Davies (2010) argue that Foucault’s theoretical concepts help question the construction of knowledge about bullying in the policies and how these discursive forms shape and define people’s understanding of objects and subjects (1995, as cited in Ellwood & Davies, 2010). Discourse, from a Foucauldian perspective, is a way of unmasking rules, divisions, and systems of specific field knowledge among more global, political domains (Foucault, 1972). Governmentality helps with understanding how certain truths appeared around the conduct of conduct, in what way and by whom the truth can be talked and implemented, and what the consequences are (Foucault, 1991; Rose, 1999). Subjectification refers both to the way individuals are constituted as subjects and to political subjection as a mode of having power exercised over oneself (Lawlore, 2014).

Contemporary educational challenges call for approaches that move beyond pre-defined knowledge and outcomes, especially in times of uncertainty and complexity. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2008) work with linking care and curiosity, this paper explores how a performative and artistic approach to curriculum can create curiosity and care. This paper asks: How can performative and artistic approaches to curriculum cultivate curiosity and care as relational, emergent, and ethical practices in contemporary education? To explore this question, the paper approaches education as entangled processes that emerge within and between students, teachers, materials, space, time, and context. Drawing on posthumanist perspectives (Barad, 2003, 2007; Haraway, 2016) within an ethico-onto-epistemology, the paper positions education as an emergent practice in which ethical response-ability (Barad, 2007; Juelskjær, 2019) and relational attentiveness are inseparable from learning itself. Response-ability means the ability to respond to different matter across both human and the more-than-human (Despret, 2004). From Karen Barads perspective, ethico-onto-epistemology means that knowing, being, and ethical response-ability are inseparable and emerge together through what we do (Barad, 2007). In education, what we create, how we create it, and how we relate while doing so are inseparable ethical acts.

Performative approaches in education highlight learning and knowledge as created through ongoing intra-actions rather than transmitted from teacher to student (Østern, 2024; Østern et al, 2025). In this framework, curiosity and care are understood not as personal traits or fixed learning outcomes, but as ethical and aesthetic dimensions that emerge relationally and situationally. Inspired by a series of artistic and performative practices within drama education in Norwegian upper-secondary schools, we explored the core elements of drama and theatre; time, space, body, text and actor-audience relations and what they could be(come). This allowed the drama students to engage with materials, spaces, texts, and temporality in ways that generate emergent learning processes. Time becomes fluid and relational, shaped by embodied engagement; space(s) operates as co-creator; and text, movement, and artistic gestures entangle, producing new forms of knowing and understanding. The roles of teacher, student, and audience are decentered, shifting the ethical and pedagogical responsibility across the participants and the learning environment. Such intra-activity allows care to be enacted as attentiveness to the ongoing flow of relations and curiosity as openness to emergent possibilities.

Although situated within arts education, this performative and artistic approach offers insights for other disciplines by demonstrating how ethics can be enacted through pedagogical practice rather than pre-defined. It invites educators to focus on how learning situations are relationally and materially produced, emphasizing care, responsiveness, and uncertainty as central educational values. In this sense, arts-based pedagogy becomes a critical resource for rethinking education as an ethical and creative practice across subjects.

At the same time, openness and participation cannot be assumed as inherently democratic or inclusive. As Bishop (2012) reminds us, participatory and open-ended practices may obscure questions of power, authorship, and responsibility if the conditions for participation are not critically examined. In educational contexts, this raises important questions about who is invited to participate, under what terms, and how risk, uncertainty, and care are unevenly distributed. A performative approach therefore requires continuous critical reflection on its ethical and pedagogical implications, rather than positioning openness itself as a pedagogical ideal.

In secondary English curricula, animals are typically encountered through symbolic and representational frameworks, functioning as metaphors for human experience, moral development or narrative themes. While such approaches are well established within literary pedagogy, they tend to stabilise animals as interpretive objects rather than attending to how animals participate materially and affectively in classroom life. Drawing on posthumanist and literary animal studies, this paper challenges representational models of animal meaning by treating animals as material–semiotic actors within pedagogical assemblages, foregrounding how they shape attention, affect and classroom relations.

Within education research, more-than-human approaches have become increasingly influential, particularly within early childhood and environmental education, where scholars have explored how learning emerges through relations between children, materials, places and nonhuman others (e.g. Hackett; Hohti; Lenz Taguchi; Schulte). However, there remains comparatively little empirical work in secondary, subject-based classrooms, especially within culturally oriented disciplines such as English. This study positions secondary literary education as a critical site for posthuman inquiry, arguing that challenges to anthropocentric pedagogy cannot remain confined to outdoor or ‘nature-based’ contexts but must also engage with the cultural forms through which animals circulate, including literary texts, classroom discourse, institutional infrastructures and curricular practices.

The paper draws on five months of postqualitative classroom-based research conducted in a UK Year 8 English classroom, focusing analytically on a moment from a lesson centred on the ‘symbol of the butterfly’ in a contemporary novel. During the lesson, students are invited to identify what the butterfly represents and how it connects to a central human character. While the task is framed in terms of symbolic interpretation, classroom interactions quickly exceed this representational logic. Students introduce personal experiences with butterflies, stories of rescue and captivity, ethical concerns about animal commodification, references to popular media and observations about architectural features designed to exclude birds from school buildings. The butterfly becomes simply a metaphor to be decoded, but a site through which multiple multispecies narratives and ethical questions emerge. Although this paper centres analytically on a single butterfly vignette, it draws on a wider corpus of classroom observations.

Analytically, the study adopts a postqualitative approach that does not seek to represent classroom reality through thematic coding or generalisable findings, but instead attends to emergent relations, interruptions and material–semiotic processes within specific pedagogical events (Hohti; Sandvik; MacLure). Methodologically, the research ‘follows the animal’ across textual, discursive and material domains, tracing how animals circulate between literary texts, pedagogical practices, students’ lived experiences, consumer cultures and institutional infrastructures. Postqualitative inquiry is used here as methodological translation, enabling concept-driven interpretive approaches familiar in literary studies to become legible within educational research, while situating literary analysis within classroom life.

Through close attention to the butterfly vignette, the paper argues that animals in secondary English classrooms function merely as symbolic devices but as pedagogical actors that reorganise classroom attention, disrupt planned learning trajectories and generate ethical and affective engagements that exceed curricular intention. Rather than understanding literacy as symbolic decoding or representational mastery, the study conceptualises reading as a relational, multispecies process through which meaning emerges in encounters with human and nonhuman actors.

The paper contributes to posthuman literacy research by extending more-than-human inquiry into a secondary, culturally mediated educational space and by demonstrating how literary animals operate as material–semiotic forces within pedagogical practice. It also offers a conceptual intervention into literary education by showing how symbolic pedagogies attempt to stabilise animal meaning, while classroom life continually reopens animals as sites of uncertainty, vulnerability and ethical relation. In doing so, the study advocates a open, multispecies approach to secondary English education, in which animals are not simply read about but read with.

The focus on adolescents in recent years has led to a risk of ethnicization (Tolomelli, 2025), so much so that it is necessary to develop a new perspective on the perspectives of adolescents. No longer ''adolescence'', but an awareness of the plurality that lies within an age group with different class connotations (Antonelli, 2021).

The theatre, despite being a place of no more than occasional attendance for young people (Doria, Brusa, 2022), regardless of social class, can help us better understand ''adolescences''. We have, in fact, the possibility of establishing a parallel between the condition of the spectator and the condition of adolescents today, because of that seeing often goes hand in hand with not being seen (Lancini, 2025).

In international literature, there are few comprehensive theoretical studies on adolescents and theatre that attempt to explore common characteristics among the various experiences developed locally, a gap also confirmed by texts that attempt to reconstruct its history (Cipolla, Coluccini, 2023). Especially regarding adolescence, few studies in the literature understand the type of relationship established between an adolescent spectator and a place like the theatre, with focus on seeing theatre and not on acting theatre.

Indeed, the theatre can be experienced both as a formal and institutional place, with the rigidity of apparatus, and as a place of encounter with the new, with the visualization of emotions and empowerment (Bertolini, Caronia, 2015; Tolomelli, 2022). This paper attempts to create a theoretical framework with four elements.

The first concerns an adolescent's encounter with theatre: how it occurs, whether and how it changes over time, and whether it is an experience more reminiscent of a gift or of resistance (Biesta, 2022) than an educational activity tied to reward and recognition, or to an evaluation that certifies its nature as a formal learning experience.

The second area of ​​observation concerns encounters with others. The social aspect of going to the theater, how it is perceived, whether it persists even after the lights are turned off, and whether it leads to a better understanding of others and of the people with whom one interacts, even outside the theatre.

The third dimension involves a reflection on spectatorship: understanding under what conditions the rules of behaviour and the construction of the theatrical space constitute an obstacle to access and are influenced by a tradition historically situated within a desired otherness, chosen by bourgeois Western society to give an high value (Sedgman, 2018). This helps us understand students' perceptions of participation, of the spectator's condition.

The last area of ​​investigation concerns the encounter with otherness from the perspective of the new. Under what conditions does the unexpected event reconfigure categories (Zizek, 2014)? Can the artist's message, which seeks to undermine stereotypes, open a path of criticism towards dominant thought (Llergo, Ceballos, 2023)? It is also interesting to understand when the spectator feels emancipated (Ranciere, 2008), competent or incompetent, ideal or ordinary (Sacchi, 2009) and whether this feeling is linked to a demographic or social issue, whether the correlation with class elements is valid.