29/08/2026
We brought the RITRATTI Lab from WOMEN WORDS WOMEN WORLD to the CRITICAL YOUTH WORK (NON) CONFERENCE
Ready the following slide 👉🏼👉🏼‼️
From 23 to 28 August we were in Weimar, Germany, hosted by the European Youth Education and Meeting Centre (EJBW), to stop, question ourselves and co-build new ways of working with and for young people.
Critical Youth Work is an international space where organisations and professionals from all over the world come together to share methodologies, workshops, strategies and perspectives, but above all to question what it means today to work with and for young people.
These 4 days were a chance to ask crucial questions, rethink established practices and create spaces where we could take the time we needed to reflect:
how can we build, but also unbuild, paths of awareness and sensitisation that truly respond to the needs and realities of young people today?
!WE DECIDED TO SHARE THE RITRATTI LAB!
During the conference, we dedicated sessions to exchanging good practices and methodologies tested by the organisations taking part, including the one developed within the KA2 project WOMEN WORDS WOMEN WORLD!
WHY RITRATTI?
With this lab, we experimented with alternative languages, going beyond words, working with an intercultural group of 13 participants: women and girls with a migrant background, from 9 different nationalities.
The challenge in front of us was immediate and twofold: on one hand, allowing participants to come forward, to tell their own story and share their experiences, to open up and take part within a safe and welcoming space. On the other hand, making that sharing accessible, so that each one could really be understood and heard, and so that empathy could happen.
It was therefore necessary to unbuild a series of barriers: not only linguistic in the strict sense, but also socio-cultural, personal and emotional.
The word, written or spoken, that is, conventional language,is the most powerful means of communication, but also the most excluding, because it is also the symbol of a privilege: those who share the same language have access to space, to relationships, to the right to tell their story and be heard, a
