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 right to education and school inclusion is quite widespread, inequalities remain for racialized youth. This constitutes the problem underlying this paper, which aims therefore to highlight the active role of racialized women in helping to make the educational systems in Europe more just and inclusive, through their biographical experiences. In particular, this contribution wants to answer three research questions: What kind of educational experiences do the black women narrate? How does the migratory status intersect with gender, race, socio-eco nomic status and other aspects of their biographical paths? How, in the transition to adulthood, does their role within specific education systems in Europe con tribute to reducing inequality? To answer these questions, I use the biographical interviews, collected during my PhD research, of 30 black women with a back ground from the Horn of Africa, living in Italy and Finland. These qualitative doc uments allow to analyze diachronically the educational experiences of the inter viewees, highlighting the problems in the Italian and Finnish systems, as well as their paths of transition, in some cases, from female black students, to black teachers or researchers. This is a fairly novel perspective, which makes the inter viewees protagonists of their own educational paths, emphasizing their ability to transform their structural constraints, inherent in the intersectionality that char acterizes them, into resources to make the education systems more just.