Quality education, personal and organizational development
This research area focuses on several interconnected directions, exploring the complex dynamics of growth and development pathways, training, and transformative learning throughout the life course. It aims to promote individual capacity and counter collective vulnerabilities.
Along these lines, special attention is devoted to teacher training under the banner of quality education for learners and teachers.
Organizational learning thus becomes a lever for enhancing the processes of developing professional and cross-cutting competencies within the framework of lifelong learning as a perspective necessary to cope with the challenges of professions and work environments.
The study of formal, informal, and nonformal educational policies and processes and the design of inclusive and innovative environments and pathways aimed at promoting learning and the well-being of individuals, groups, communities, and organizations aims to respond to the needs of an ever-changing society and ensure an effective impact on the quality of individual life and the common good.
Human relations, social justice, and inclusion
This research area encompasses the study of identity, social, cultural, and political processes that contribute to the development and maintenance of inclusion, well-being, and social justice. The objects of investigation in this area involve interpersonal, intergenerational, inter-species relationships, interactions in groups and social networks with their symbolic and ethical content, consumption dynamics, care for the self, the other, and the world, the concept of dialogue as a communicative, moral and collective truth-seeking practice, and the history of ideas as both a key to understanding the present and a reservoir of meaning for the present. Specific attention is paid to the analysis of conditions of inequality, power dynamics, and individual, social, and cultural factors that impact the possibility for individuals and groups to actively inhabit contexts that are marked by a plurality of differences, also using critical and intersectional theories and methodologies (e.g., gender studies and queer theories).
Human and non-human
This area of research focuses on theories and methods for studying behavioral and cognitive processes, processing and interpreting sensory stimuli, and how the environment acquires meaning. The central interest is in personal and emotional psychic characteristics, behaviors that form the basis for individual differences, motivational processes, interaction with natural and artificial environments, and unconscious processes of individual and collective life.
Thinking processes about the development of ideas, concepts, memory, consciousness, creativity, imagination, needs, criticism, judgment, and any representation of the world are fundamental to this area.
Emphasis is given to analyzing the human capacity to interact with information technologies, artificial intelligence systems, and devices, as well as theoretical reflection on the definition of the human and the ethical and political relations between human and non-human.
The area promotes the study of well-being as a key to support and prevention, to improve the quality of life for individuals and groups, taking also into account stressful and risky situations.
