Visible bodies, invisible subjectivities? The role of education in the digital age

Abstract

In the digital ecosystem, female bodies are hyper-visible, standardised according to recurring aesthetic norms and embedded within mechanisms of power that shape their representation and desirability from adolescence onwards (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1975). At a time when the family and school are undergoing a transformation of their symbolic authority and educational impact (Biesta, 2013; Cambi, 2000;  Recalcati, 2014), there is an urgent need to promote education in critical and divergent thinking, capable of countering standardisation and conformism. From this perspective, the Pedagogy of Differences (Lopez, 2018) and Media Education share converging aims: to form individuals capable of consciously inhabiting physical and digital spaces, exercising forms of critical citizenship (Buckingham, 2003) and developing capacities oriented towards the valorisation of otherness and the care of the self and the other (Mortari, 2006; Nussbaum, 2011; Ulivieri, 2018).