The educational experiences of black women in Europe. Challenges for a socially just education model

In Europe, a continent with a long history of immigration, where the \r\nright to education and school inclusion is quite widespread, inequalities remain \r\nfor racialized youth. This constitutes the problem underlying this paper, which \r\naims therefore to highlight the active role of racialized women in helping to \r\nmake the educational systems in Europe more just and inclusive, through their \r\nbiographical experiences. In particular, this contribution wants to answer three \r\nresearch questions: What kind of educational experiences do the black women \r\nnarrate? How does the migratory status intersect with gender, race, socio-eco\r\nnomic status and other aspects of their biographical paths? How, in the transition \r\nto adulthood, does their role within specific education systems in Europe con\r\ntribute to reducing inequality? To answer these questions, I use the biographical \r\ninterviews, collected during my PhD research, of 30 black women with a back\r\nground from the Horn of Africa, living in Italy and Finland. These qualitative doc\r\numents allow to analyze diachronically the educational experiences of the inter\r\nviewees, highlighting the problems in the Italian and Finnish systems, as well as \r\ntheir paths of transition, in some cases, from female black students, to black \r\nteachers or researchers. This is a fairly novel perspective, which makes the inter\r\nviewees protagonists of their own educational paths, emphasizing their ability to \r\ntransform their structural constraints, inherent in the intersectionality that char\r\nacterizes them, into resources to make the education systems more just.