Conference Agenda

With the accelerating degradation of ecosystems, biodiversity loss, pollution, and the escalating climate crisis, green human rights have emerged as a critical area of academic and policy discourse. Green human rights encompass the right to clean air, access to safe drinking water, preservation of biodiversity, and the responsible use of natural resources. These rights extend the scope of traditional human rights and address the urgent need for environmental justice and intergenerational equity. However, despite their growing importance, the conceptual framework and operational definitions of green human rights remain fragmented across disciplines, with varying terminologies, classifications, and interpretations.

This presentation will outline the results of a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of green/environmental human rights literature, offering insights into publication trends, key contributors, thematic clusters, and knowledge gaps. Complementing this quantitative review, qualitative content analysis will explore how green human rights are understood as potential catalysts for social innovation. Specifically, the study will examine how green human rights can inspire new legal instruments, social movements, governance models, and technological or cultural innovations to strengthen societies’ adaptive capacity in the face of environmental crises and climate change.

The originality of this research lies in its dual analytical approach—combining bibliometric mapping with qualitative exploration of green human rights as a driver of social innovation. Previous research has largely overlooked this perspective. Based on the findings, the presentation will propose a future research agenda to advance this emerging interdisciplinary field.

The imaginary world of migration is increasingly shaped by the exclusion, rejection and violence conveyed by certain conservative and extremist ideologies in the mass media and by political actors. Numerous studies have highlighted the construction of a highly stigmatized discourse on immigration, which identifies the foreign Other as a threat, often rendering him or her “undesirable”. Faced with this situation, films on migration offer a different viewpoint, providing a more sensitive vision of the reality of migration. This paper will examine the extent to which certain Latin American films on migration can be considered as alternative narratives of the migratory experience, and question the future of living together, a crucial issue for our societies in the context of the accelerating mobility in which we find ourselves.

The paper seeks to understand the novel and re-imagined role of civil servants in fostering social innovation. Through fusing the theories of socio-technical system (organisational development) and street-level bureaucracy (public administration), the article presents challenges and opportunities civil servants encounter in the face of emerging technologies and inclusion of citizens in co-creation processes.

When designing public services, the public administration often overlooks citizens' needs. However, citizens' contributions are a vital source of innovative ideas to calibrate public services and make them more human-centred.

How can civil servants, as the face of public administration, encourage citizens' active and effective participation in fostering social innovation? How do civil servants adapt to and use novel technologies to promote and share innovative co-creation practices? Through a comprehensive desk analysis of good practices and a series of semi-structured interviews with experts in democratic innovation and co-creation processes, the paper will emanate guidelines for civil servants and policy makers on guiding participatory practices that are both innovative and inclusive.

This study explores clowning as a form of social innovation, analyzing its impact on the inclusive education of students with disabilities or migrant backgrounds through a sociological lens. This research investigates how clowning, traditionally associated with medical settings, can be re-signified as a tool for building inclusive communities within schools. The analysis, grounded in concepts such as inclusive education and educational community, examines the case study of the non-profit organization Clown One Italia. More specifically, it analyses how the activities conducted by this organization in Lombardy schools influence relational dynamics among students, teachers, and operators. Through the presentation of this good practice and employing a qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted and codified using NVivo software to reconstruct the narratives of clown operators, educators, and former students. Findings highlight how clowning promotes the creation of social capital through shared emotional experiences, strengthens student agency, and fosters positive social interactions. Notably, an increased awareness of inequalities and a transformation of the concept of care towards reciprocity and solidarity are observed. This research demonstrates how clowning can serve as an innovative solution to address the complex societal challenges of inclusive education, contributing to the construction of a more equitable and cohesive society, both inside and outside the school. In this light, the contribution engages with the sociological debate on social innovation, emphasizing the role of education and artistic practices in driving social change.