Conference Agenda

Migration has been a crucial global phenomenon, affecting individuals and societies for many years. According to the most recent report, as of 2020, migrants constituted 3.60% of the world's population, with an estimated 281 million (McAuliffe & Oucho, 2024). In recent years, emigration from Türkiye has also been noticeably rising in parallel with the global trend. Turkish Statistical Institute (2025) reports showed that 151,000 Turkish citizens left the country in 2024. Migration is not only a physical move; it's a process that starts long before the departure. Migrants' experiences in the pre-departure phase are unique. Due to various individual and non-individual factors, each person experiences a different process. And, they may face multiple challenges during the pre-departure phase. They experience pre-departure stress due to some challenges such as quitting jobs, arranging new accommodation, and completing detailed legal processes (Tabor & Milfont, 2011), financial factors such as high costs, recurring payments, and exchange rates (Khanal & Gaulee, 2019), getting accurate information (Khanal & Gaulee, 2019), pre-migration concerns about loneliness, unfamiliar food, accommodation quality, language barriers, and potential (Brown & Aktaş, 2011).

Mental health is a critical concern for prospective migrants, as it both influences the decision to migrate and shapes how individuals experience the pre- and post-departure processes. Research indicates that migrant candidates may experience increased levels of depression and anxiety symptoms (Sancak et al., 2023). These symptoms may either precede migration and motivating individuals to leave, or emerge as a result of the psychological demands of preparing for migration. Also, pre-departure emotional states, cognitive styles, and psychological resources are closely linked to post-migration adjustment. Studies demonstrate the role of pre-migration resources as well. Higher levels of pre-migration resources, such as self-esteem, body image, and social and school competence, were associated with lower acculturative stress and homesickness and higher loneliness and emotional or behavioral problems (Tartakovsky, 2007). Also, under-met expectations were found to be related to depression (Rogers & Ward, 1993) and having no clear goals and poorly planned migration was found to be related to mental health issues (Chou, 2009). How individuals interpret the meaning of migration itself also plays a key role in their psychological well-being during settlement (Bürgelt et al., 2008). Together, these findings suggest that psychoeducation and psychological preparation in the pre-departure period may serve a protective function. In line with this, migrant workers have emphasized the need for pre-departure programs that go beyond practical information and include structured mental health support (Regmi et al., 2020).

Given the increasing number of migrants, the migration process, which varies according to individual variables and conditions, deserves to be examined multidimensionally. To represent the multifaceted nature of pre-migration experiences, this study incorporates several theoretical stances. Push and pull theory (Lee, 1966) helps interpret participants' fundamental migration decisions, relative deprivation theory (Stark, 1984) facilitates the interpretation of the mechanisms of some factors in migration decisions, and ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1977) provides a framework to understand the interaction between the systems they are part of and their migration decisions and processes. Drawing on this multidimensional theoretical framework, this study aims develop an understanding of how Turkish emigrant candidates experience their pre-departure period.

The growing plurality of religious belongings has become an ordinary condition of contemporary schooling (Knauth, 2008; Vestrucci, 2023). It challenges school systems not only at an organizational level, but also at a deeper one, calling into question education as a practice of coexistence, recognition, and the construction of a shared horizon (Bano et al., 2020; Goodman, 2012). Schools are required to engage with differences that permeate students’ lived experiences, relationships, implicit curricula, and forms of participation in school life (Ahmed & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2015; Haynes, 2023), making reflection on how such differences are acknowledged or silenced unavoidable.

Within this framework, the central issue is not the presence of religion in school spaces per se, but institutional responses to its plurality. Strategies based on the neutralization or symbolic removal of the religious dimension, historically associated with secular arrangements of schooling (Farrow, 2004), risk producing institutional indifference that does not eliminate asymmetries but makes them opaque (Benhabib, 2005; Lee, 2017). The absence of overt dialogue may therefore coincide with a failure to engage educationally with difference, leaving tensions unaddressed and shaping students’ experiences and teachers’ practices (Davis, 2010; Zilliacus, 2013).

Against this backdrop, the concept of reasonable accommodation offers a useful lens for analysing school practices (Bribosia et al., 2010; Griffiths, 2016). Beyond its legal origins and association with special educational needs (de Asís Roig, 2016), it can be understood as a way for schools to mediate between common rules and concrete situations, avoiding assimilation and fragmentation (Hill KC & Valero-Estarellas, 2024). In educational settings, it takes the form of everyday micro-decisions affecting students’ participation in school life (Beaman, 2012). When such decisions rely primarily on individual initiative, they risk uneven responses and shift the management of pluralism from institutional responsibility to personal sensitivity.

School autonomy represents a crucial node within this tension. When reduced to a bureaucratic margin, it remains a largely unquestioned backdrop. When embraced as a space for educational decision-making, it brings to the surface value-laden choices orienting school action (Urgate et al., 2022). Autonomous decisions related to religious pluralism may expose schools to symbolic conflicts and public contestation, particularly when they challenge implicit notions of cultural normality (MacMullen, 2009). In such moments, schools become sites of confrontation between competing conceptions of educational justice, secularism, and civic coexistence.

Religious pluralism thus emerges not as an issue for emergency-driven responses, but as a structural challenge exposing the limits of secular frameworks centred on neutrality. Practices of reasonable accommodation and the exercise of school autonomy point to the need for a post-secular understanding of schooling (Fabretti, 2013), in which educational responsibility toward religious difference is institutionally assumed rather than neutralized.

Building on these premises, the paper focuses on Italian school system. Over recent decades, Italian schools have experienced growing cultural and religious heterogeneity, while school autonomy, introduced in the early 2000s, has expanded local responsibility for educational decision-making. More recently, the introduction of reasonable accommodation into the Italian legal framework (Law 62/2024) has reshaped how religious difference is recognized and negotiated in public schools.

Located in Lombardy, this study aims to answer the following questions:

• How everyday school practices contribute to making religious pluralism an object of educational recognition, or conversely, of institutional invisibilisation;
• How school autonomy is interpreted and enacted by educational actors in managing religious pluralism, particularly in relation to practices of reasonable accommodation and the tensions they generate.

This empirical focus is not intended as a merely local case, but as a vantage point for engaging with broader European and international debates on how public schools negotiate religious pluralism within non-confessional education systems.

In recent years, educational research has increasingly focused on the conditions under which knowledge is produced, thereby encouraging a reflection on knowledge production that is not only methodological but also sensitive to power relations, temporality, and context. In this process, the circle of knowledge producers has expanded considerably. Alongside universities and public institutions, organizations, commercial actors, and data-based technologies are increasingly involved in knowledge generation and decision-making processes. This development entails the privileging of certain forms of knowledge, while others are marginalized or rendered invisible. Against this backdrop, the present contribution positions itself within this discourse by discussing responsive and participatory research approaches in qualitative research from an educational science perspective.

The discussion draws on experiences and findings from the collaborative research project MIRASTO. Migrant Self-Organizations and Social Pedagogical Continuing Education. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the European Union through the ESF Plus funding programme and is conducted in close cooperation between several German universities (Frankfurt, Oldenburg, and Braunschweig) and migrant self-organizations (MSOs). The responsive study aims to examine the relationship between organization and biography with regard to social pedagogical continuing education in migrant self-organizations in Germany and, based on the findings, to develop modules and materials for diversity-sensitive training in (social) pedagogical fields of practice.

The project focuses on continuing education programmes targeting newly immigrated academics who have acquired pedagogical qualifications and/or professional experience in their countries of origin. MIRASTO does not address MSOs merely as objects of investigation or fields of practice, but as actors who actively co-produce scientific knowledge. In this sense, the project explicitly seeks to explore responsive and participatory research approaches and to critically reflect on their potentials and limitations. Central to this endeavour are the perspectives of those individuals and organizations who shape and participate in the examined processes of continuing education and professionalization, and whose experiences, interpretations, and interests often remain marginalized. This approach not only holds the potential to provide participants with an empowering space within scientific knowledge production, but also to transform the relationship between knowledge production and society and to respond to key challenges of contemporary knowledge regimes in times of multiple, overlapping crises.

Engaging with the concept of epistemic violence enables a power-critical reflection on the conditions of knowledge production. Scholars such as Spivak (1988) and Haraway (1988) have pointed to hegemonic knowledge orders and the powerful positioning of knowledge, thereby making visible whose perspectives are systematically marginalized and which power asymmetries are reproduced within knowledge regimes. The disruption of these relations of power and violence, and their translation into power-critical research practice, can be facilitated through participatory research approaches. Such approaches primarily aim to strengthen the participation of social actors in scientific knowledge production, thereby implementing democratic principles within research practice and reflecting on—and potentially reducing—power asymmetries between academia and practice (von Unger 2014; Terhart & Proyer 2023). Participatory research enables the integration of diverse research perspectives across institutional and systemic boundaries, opening up new forms of knowledge production in which scientific, practical, and experiential knowledge are not hierarchically separated but are related to one another in a dialogical manner (von Unger 2014).

At the same time, the contribution critically reflects on the limitations and tensions inherent in participatory research approaches.