Summary of keynote

Title: Otherness in preschools

Unlike the usual assumption, otherness is not just a recent trend, taking place in remote housing projects or more predictably in distant exotic places, it is rather a component of any social interaction. Hence, otherness not only is the matrix of understanding of a large range of experiences, which include the recently accommodated notion of diversity, but it is the very locus of new ways of acting and interacting in times of a growing heterogeneity that penetrate preschools as much as any other setting of education or simply social life. The aim of the talk will be to explore and describe embodied otherness in the places where it appears to be relevant and sometimes decisive in the stories told by teachers as well as parents.