“WHY ARE WE FORCED TO TALK ABOUT INCLUSION AND INTERCULTURALITY?” A Critical Research Journey toward Justice and Equity in Early Childhood Education in Italy: A Mixed-Methods Collection of Studies.

This doctoral dissertation critically examines interculturality and inclusion in public early childhood education (ECE) services (ages 0–6) in the Northwest Italy. While initially framed within mainstream institutional approaches to intercultural competences and educator well-being, the research progressively revealed the limits—and risks—of treating interculturality as a technical, individual, or depoliticized construct. Rather than confirming pre-existing models, the research process itself generated a profound theoretical, methodological, and ethical shift: interculturality emerged as intelligible only when situated within its structural, political, and epistemic conditions. Developed through an institutional collaboration between the University of Genoa and the Municipality of Genoa and funded by Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), the thesis includes a mixed-methods design articulated across four interconnected empirical studies. An initial quantitative phase explores the relationship between educators’ intercultural competences, well-being, and burnout. Subsequent qualitative, ethnographic, and narrative studies foreground the everyday experiences of educators and parents with migration backgrounds, tracing how interculturality and inclusion are negotiated within asymmetrical institutional, labor, and policy contexts. A central contribution of the dissertation lies in its reflexive and critical epistemological stance. Drawing on liberation psychology, feminist and intersectional theories, decolonial thought, and narrative practice, the research interrogates how dominant constructs—such as burnout, intercultural competences, and inclusion—can individualize systemic injustice and obscure relations of power. Auto-reflexivity is treated not as a methodological add-on but as an ethical and political practice that exposes the researcher’s positionality, institutional constraints, and complicity within knowledge production. Findings demonstrate that interculturality cannot be reduced to skill acquisition, diversity management, or symbolic inclusion. Instead, it is a relational and contested process shaped by structural precarity, labor conditions, governance arrangements, and broader regimes of bordering and exclusion. Educators’ well-being emerges as a matter of social justice rather than individual resilience, while parents with history of migration appear as active epistemic agents and co-constructors of educational spaces. The dissertation ultimately argues that speaking of interculturality without addressing its systemic and political foundations risks reproducing the very inequalities it claims to challenge. By documenting the passage from critical awareness to concrete transformations in school routines, spaces, and decision-making processes, the study shows how early childhood education can function as a strategic site for epistemic justice and structural change. These transformations demonstrate that inclusion becomes meaningful only when it is enacted through participatory, decolonial, and institutionally accountable practices embedded in everyday educational life.