Popular education as a transformative paradigm in educational work with Roma and Sinti communities

Abstract

The paper intends to deepen the existing relationships between a popular education perspective and the development of educational and social work with Roma and Sinti communities in peripheral contexts, trying to deconstruct a marginal and marginalizing narrative, recovering the transformative force inherent in the physical but also symbolic, social, and above all political margins. Such reflection is necessarily rooted in the intercultural perspective, through which it is appropriate to read the relationships between people and groups, the result of power relations and processes of coloniality, and to design decolonial educational, training and social and political resistance pathways that are intrinsically dynamic and plural. For this reason, two significant experiences carried out in different territories will be examined, involving not only Roma and Sinti communities in processes of emergence from conditions of marginalization and social exclusion, but, within a fully intercultural and intersectional perspective, call into question a plurality of broader subjectivities, in a close and necessary relationship with the surrounding territory and with the broader goal of building greater social equity and full democratic participation.