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This paper offers a frame to reflect on the role of aesthetics in the development of a critical pedagogy for social justice in adult education. Arts-based research and practice have the power to illuminate the participants' views, ideas, and feelings, as well as the systems of values that are embedded in their contexts. Critical thinking and awareness are the result of relational and political processes, triggered by experience and going beyond subjectivity. The authors aim at defining a pedagogical practical theory that celebrates complexity, opens possibilities, develops the new, and triggers deliberate action, rather than fostering specific behaviours or learning. The paper itself is a piece of that pedagogy, developed through a cooperative method of writing-as-inquiry (duoethnography), here triggered by a photographic exhibition and resulting in the dialogic exploration of feminism in the authors' lives. In this example, it is shown how individual voices can be juxtaposed to develop an open, transforming theory of feminism, identity, and education. IntroductionThis paper is the provisional result of an ongoing dialogue among us, and involving many other learners. It is not meant to present a polished theory or accomplished practice, but to foster further dialogue. Our approach is centred on relationships as the fabric of learning: as adult educators and learners ourselves, we interpret education as the creation of dialogic spaces for enhancing critical consciousness about those issues which are relevant for our lives, individually and collectively, but often silenced. Critical pedagogy seeks for the transformation of the relationships, actions, and discourses we live by. In this respect, we share a common interest towards art as a fundamental human experience and a powerful trigger of learning. We use it extensively in our work in university, with professionals, and with distressed parents and disenfranchised subjects. We also use it to explore our theories, practices, and epistemologies: art illuminates, in fact, our mind frames and relationships to knowing. Art sustains a kind of knowing which is out of reach for the purposeful, rational mind.In the last few years, we developed multiple conversations (from the Latin cum + versari, 'hanging around in the same space') around our pedagogy by sharing biographic and ethnographic narratives, artworks, poems, and readings. We visited exhibitions, read poetry and watched movies, among us and with others, as ways to develop our theories and practices of adult education. In this paper, we aim to build a provisional but satisfying theory of the relationship between aesthetic experience and adult learning.A theory is satisfying when it addresses relevant issues in people's lives, not least the researcher. Besides, it appears beautiful, true, ethical, convincing, and useful. A good enough bunch of ideas that speak to our emotions, feelings, and values.

This paper zooms in on a part of a larger qualitative and participatory study on the integration of asylum seekers and refugees in a specific Italian territory, that focuses on the embodied experience of newcomers in relation to the physical and social space, in daily interactions with others, and with the public discourse. We use Bateson's systemic understanding of culture contact to illuminate the struggles, constraints and possibilities of coexistence and to challenge the narrow interpretation of integration as a one-sided effort of the individual. We think of culture contact as a complex, relational, and entangled process of interaction in the human and non-human world. So, our methodology in this part of the project, based on sensobiographic walks, is a way to perform and to search culture contact, by creating an unexpected narrative and dialogic encounter between newcomers, natives and researchers in the physical space, using senses to enhance a sense of connectedness and illuminate learning, hence opening possibilities not only for understanding, but for transformative experiences and unprecedented relationships.

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L'articolo presenta un'esperienza di ricerca collettiva e incorporata nella mostra Metaspore di Anicka Yi, volta all'esplorazione della sensibilità ecosistemica delle ricercatrici a contatto con il lavoro dell'artista. La contemporaneità con le sue trasformazioni è qui interpretata come processo sistemico nel quale dialogano l'umano e il non-umano; il superamento del pensiero binario e la metafora delle spore raccontano di un'ecologia complessa, contaminata e contaminante, tra organismi e tecnologia, vita e senso, azione e contesto. Le ricercatrici dialogano sull'esperienza e le rappresentazioni innescate dalla visita, con l'obiettivo pedagogico di interrogare lo spazio museale in quanto mesosistema che forma e trasforma. La diversità dei corpi-menti (compresi quelli degli altri visitatori) consente di generare narrazioni plurime in movimento e di interrogare la valenza trasformativa dell'arte.* L'articolo è frutto del lavoro congiunto delle autrici. A fini concorsuali, si segnala che i paragrafi 1 e 3.2. sono da attribuire a Silvia Luraschi; i paragrafi 2 e 3.1. ad Antonella Cuppari; i paragrafi 3.3. e 4 a Laura Formenti. Le restanti parti sono state stese a più mani.