Cosmopolitan educational disobedience. A proposal for changing times?

Social disobedience in present times cannot be analytically portrayed without considering its close and ineluctable relationship with the social milieu of the pandemic. In this sense, an evocative example that connects dissent and the pandemic is the transnational protest against the COVID Green pass (and against any kind of mandatory vaccination policy) across Europe since 2021. These events require the scientific observer to consider the generation of a complex phenomenology characterized by different nuances of collective actions if confronted with the classics of civil/social disobedience. It was also emblematic of the disparate groupings that joined these protests against Covid restrictions. The main aim of this chapter is to briefly discuss the first pieces of evidence and theoretical implications coming from a qualitative research project focused on the participation of the Italian home-schooling groups in the protests against the COVID-19 restrictions. Amplified by the pandemic lockdowns, alternative education in Italy is a growing phenomenon but an elusive community for social researchers to access. Collected data show that the members of this community present some oppositional elements (which therefore explain their support for the protest) but they appear to be substantially configured as opponents of the institutions as such, albeit presenting some elements of a cosmopolitan socialization: openness to freedom and tolerance, and solidarity towards distant others. Analysing the Italian alternative education community on this issue implied the need for a critical confrontation with the social context of reference unveiling alternative trajectories for social disobedience dynamics.