Advisory Board

Linguist and researcher specializing in language acquisition in multilingual contexts. My research interests include teacher attitudes and practices towards multilingual education; the role of home languages in study practices at home; and the valorization of students' diverse linguistic repertoires within language education, alongside cooperation with migrant-background families to navigate the complexities of multilingual education.

Lucia Balduzzi is Full Professor in Education (SSD PAED-02/A) at the Department of Education Sciences ‘Giovanni Maria Bertin’ at the University of Bologna. Her main research interests concern early childhood education and care (ECEC), the analysis of educational policies, the definition of emerging professional profiles for educational practitioners, and the use of active and cooperative teaching and learning methodologies. She coordinates research in the field of early childhood education policies and actively participates in national and international conferences and projects. She is the coordinator of the Teacher Training section of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Bologna. 

Claudio Baraldi is a professor of Sociology of cultural and communicative processes at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Department of Studies on language and culture. His research focuses on forms of intercultural and interlinguistic mediation and adult-children interactions in educational and deliberative contexts. He has published many papers in international books and journals, volumes for Springer and Palgrave, edited and co-edited volumes with John Benjamins, Bloomsbury, Palgrave, Routledge and Sage.

Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel is an Associate Professor in linguistics at Sorbonne University, INSPE de Paris, and a member of the CeLiSo (Centre de Linguistique en Sorbonne) research unit. She holds a PhD in linguistics, specializing in language acquisition, gesture studies, and multimodality. She has developed a multimodal approach to child language development, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses in her research on children’s negation.
She is the principal investigator of a research project on the teaching and learning of English in French preschool education. A specialist in language didactics, she is also involved in teacher education, with a focus on training primary and secondary school teachers in English language teaching. Her research interests include first and early second language acquisition, multimodality, interaction, and language pedagogy.

Sarah Bigi received her PhD in Linguistics from Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, in Milano (Italy). Her research focuses in particular on the analysis of doctor-patient interactions in chronic care settings. She has described the forms and functions of argumentation in these interactions, as well as specific linguistic structures such as interrogative structures, metaphorical use and vague language. She is also conducting research on a new communication skills curriculum for healthcare professionals. She coordinates the Healthy Reasoning Lab (https://www.healthyreasoning-lab.eu/).

Chiara Bove is Full Professor of General and Social Pedagogy at the University of Milano-Bicocca where she teaches in the area of Pedagogy/culture of education and Research Method in Education. She is the Coordinator of the PhD in Education in the Contemporary Society. Her research deals with Early Childhood Education, parent-teacher interaction and dialogue, and teacher's professional development. Among her publications, Capirsi non è ovvio (2020, Franco Angeli). 

Asta Cekaite is a Professor at Thematic Research Unit, Linköping University, Sweden. Her research involves an interdisciplinary approach to language, culture, and social interaction. Specific foci include social perspectives on bilingualism, embodiment, touch, emotion, and moral socialization. Empirical fields cover adult-child and children’s peer group interactions in educational settings, and family in various cultural contexts, and social work interactional practices. With prof. M. H. Goodwin she has co-authored Embodied family choreography: Practices of control, care and mundane creativity (Routledge, 2018). She has co-edited (with L. Mondada) Touch in social interaction: Touch, language and body (Routledge, 2021). She has published in Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, Child and Family Social Work, Linguistics and Education, Text & Talk, Research on Social Interaction, among others.

Dr. Silvia Demozzi is an Associate Professor of General and Social Pedagogy and Philosophy of Education at the University of Bologna. Her expertise in the pedagogy of care within healthcare settings is grounded in long-standing teaching on clinician–patient communication in Oncology within the Medicine and Surgery degree programme. She also teaches Sex Education within the Midwifery degree programme, with additional training experience on communicative and relational competences for midwives and other care professionals. Her research has addressed children’s hospitalization and meaning-making in relation to illness, death, and vulnerability, with a specific focus on how care is enacted through professional–family interaction.

Alessandra Fasulo is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Portsmouth UK, and Director of Postgraduate Research for the Faculty of Science and Health . She is an expert in social interaction processes across the life span: using observational methods in naturalistic settings, she has worked on children’s socialisation in school and in the family,  including  children with atypical development, and on psychotherapeutic and doctor-patient interactions. Integrating lived experience to direct observation, she also worked on autobiographical accounts of living with different conditions. She has published books on conversation analysis, interview methods, agency in language  and identity process of marginalised groups. 

Marilena Fatigante is an Associate Professor of Social Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome. Her research employs ethnographic observation, video recording, and Conversation Analysis to study discursive exchanges in family, educational, and institutional contexts. She is a child psychotherapist and a trainer in educational and healthcare settings. More recently, her research interests have focused on the negotiation of expert knowledge among adults involved in children’s education—educators, teachers, and parents—in contexts of parental education.

Stephanie Fox (PhD, Communication) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal (Canada). Her research expertise relates to interprofessional communication and collaboration in health and social care organizations. She studies how collaborators navigate and make sense of shared problems across professional and other boundaries. Her recent work examines the relational dimensions of collaboration, including team care. 

Valeria Friso works in the fields of didactics and special pedagogy. Her research focuses on care and support processes, with particular attention to persons with disabilities across the different stages of life. Issues related to quality of life and the development of authentic life projects for all, including persons with disabilities, require continuous dialogue with disciplines beyond pedagogy. For this reason, she participates in competitive research projects and develops advanced training programmes in collaboration with scholars from disciplines such as architecture, law, management, psychology, and economics. 

Renata Galatolo is associate professor in Psychology at the University of Bologna. Her main research interests include discursive psychology and conversation analysis applied to institutional and ordinary interaction. Her current research activity focuses on doctor-patient interaction, family interaction and parent-teacher conferences. Her recent publications include Colla, V. & Galatolo, R. “Reading to Children, reading with Children: Parents’ Interactional Practices Fostering Children’s Participation in Shared Book-Reading at Home”, Rivista Italiana di Educazione Familiare 2025, Simone, M.; Galatolo, R.; Fasulo, A. “Haptic Resources in Pain Communication: New Amputees Redirecting Doctors’ Professional Touch at the Prosthetic Clinic”, Health Communication 2024, Margutti, P.; Galatolo, R.; Simone, M.; Drew, P. “Proposing surgery at the prosthetic clinic: managing patient resistance”, Patient Education and Counseling 2024.

Laura Gavioli teaches courses in English language and linguistics, dialogue interpreting and translation studies. Her research work focuses on interaction studies, both from a cross-linguistic perspective (comparing talk in English and Italian) and as occurring in plurilingual settings, where interlocutors are speakers of English, Italian and other languages. She is an expert in Public Service Interpreting research. With Prof. Cecilia Wadensjö from Stockholm University, she has edited the Routledge Handbook of Public Service Interpreting (2023) and is, since then, an acknowledged authority in the field. For more info: https://personale.unimore.it/rubrica/dettaglio/lgavioli

Paola Govoni is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, working at the intersection of history, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and women’s and gender studies. She collaborates with scholars in science and technology to foster dialogue between the natural and social sciences in research and teaching, with a focus on environmental and social justice. Her publications address science communication and the history of women in science over the last three centuries, highlighting boundary-crossing practices that challenge the nature-culture divide. For publications, see: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/p.govoni/publications

Piera Margutti is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Conversation Analysis at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Her research spans from the study of talk in classrooms, clinical encounters and  mundane interaction. She investigated both teachers’ conducts such as questioning, evaluating and reproaching, and pupils’ responses and initiatives. She studied medical interaction in various settings, paying particular attention to the epistemic imbalance between patients and doctors and to patients' agency and initiatives.   

I conduct research in the medical and healthcare field, with experience in the implementation of care and clinical management projects within hospital settings. My main goal is to support rehabilitation professionals and health policymakers in promoting evidence, appropriateness and care in rehabilitation. 

Leena Mikkola, PhD, a Professor of Communication Studies at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences at Tampere University, Finland. Mikkola’s research focuses on interprofessional and interpersonal communication in social and health care teams. In her current research, she concentrates on dialectical tensions in interprofessional collaboration and identity construction among social and health care professionals and in client-provider communication. Methodologically, Mikkola’s work is primarily qualitative, with a particular emphasis on discursive approaches. She leads the research project Interprofessional Communication in Health and Social Care Teams (MOVUS), which focuses on multi-agency communication in social services, especially in child, youth, and family services.

Paola Milani, Full Professor of Family Education in the Department FISPPA at the University of Padova, P.I. in the LabRIEF (https://www.labrief-unipd.it), Italian representative in COST action 18123, EuroFam-Net, of European Comission (2019-2024), she leads the research program P.I.P.P.I. promoted by the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies from 2011: it is the largest program in the history of Italian social policies, recognized in the 2022 Budget Law as one of the first Essential Public Levels of Social Services, through which the Italian Child Protection and Welfare system is undergoing a repositioning of epistemic and deontic authority towards families in vulnerable situations. She is author of more than 250 scientific papers. 

Aliyah Morgenstern is a Professor of Linguistics at Sorbonne Nouvelle University and Vice President for European Affairs. Raised in a multilingual family, she developed a lasting interest in how language emerges, develops, and functions in everyday life, especially in early childhood. Her research focuses on multimodal interaction and language socialization. She and her research teams collect multilingual and multimodal datasets of everyday life interaction, shared openly with the scientific community. Her work brings together socio-pragmatic, constructionist, interactional and functionalist perspectives to advance the study of multimodal situated language use.

Elena Luppi is a Full Professor in the Department of Educational Sciences at the University of Bologna. She conducts empirical research in secondary and higher education, as well as in vocational education and training. She has contributed to the development of pedagogical studies on the third age through empirical research carried out in educational settings involving older adults and in long-term care facilities. Her work includes the analysis, design, and development of educational intervention models aimed at promoting intergenerational dialogue. 

Tiziana Pironi is Full Professor of History of Education at the Department of Education Studies, University of Bologna. She served as coordinator of the National Project Maria Montessori: from the past to the present. Reception and implementation of her educational method in Italy on the 150th anniversary of her birth (PRIN 2017). She has also served as President of the Italian Centre for Historical-Educational Research (CIRSE). Among her publications, the edited volume Authority in Crisis. School, Family and Society Before and After ’68 (2020) is particularly noteworthy.

Fausta Sabatano is Associate Professor at the University of Salerno, where she teaches Special Pedagogy and Pedagogy of Marginality, and Special Pedagogy for Socio-Educational Contexts. Her publications include: Libertà marginali. La sfida educativa tra devianza, delinquenza e sistema camorristico (with G. Pagano, Guerini, 2019); Being educators in extreme contexts (RPD, 2018); Educare per includere in contesti di rischio e marginalità (Encyclopaideia, 2015); "Me l'ha detto mia madre." Il sostegno ai genitori difficili nelle dinamiche di cambiamento (La Famiglia, 2013).

Maria Teresa Tagliaventi is a researcher at the Department of Education Studies since 2004, where she teaches Sociology of education, Welfare state and Social policy. She focuses her research mainly on inequalities and differences in educational processes and the impact of social policies on the well-being of children and families. She is the UniBo representative for CREAN, the Children's Rights European Academic Network. Through this network, she focuses her researches on the social participation of children receiving palliative care.

Madeleine Wirzén holds a PhD in Child Studies. Her research focuses on institutional interaction, with particular attention to how interactional projects are carried out within such settings. She currently leads a project on child interviews in social services, examining children’s participation in these institutional conversations. Website: https://liu.se/en/employee/madka59 

Lucia Zannini, MA, PhD in Healthcare Professionals’ Education, works at the Department of Biomedical Sciences for Health, University of Milan. For many years, she has been engaged in narrative medicine and care programs based on patient-centered approaches. She teaches patient education in several undergraduate degree programs, including Pediatric Nursing and Health Nursing, both of which train professionals who work with children and their families. In the Medical School of the University of Milan,  she teaches narrative approaches to collecting patients’ illness experiences. Collaborating with medical teachers, she has developed clinical and group practices to enhance medical students’ reflective writing competencies. She has over 30 years of experience in training healthcare professionals in mentoring and has conducted diverse faculty development activities. An updated list of her publications is available at https://air.unimi.it/browse?type=author&authority=rp31993&sort_by=2&order=DESC.