Radicality as a Practice of Situated Learning in Extinction Rebellion Italy: The 7-Day Primavera Democrazia Actions

In recent years, environmental movements have expanded significantly across both the Global North and the Global South. Since Greta Thunberg’s 2019 “GlobalStrike For Climate”, new forms of climate activism and resistance have emerged worldwide, contributing to the growth of movements such as Extinction Rebellion(XR) and related initiatives. These movements maintain a strong connection between global systemic issues and local realities. In Italy, for example, XR has developed a network of 19 local groups distributed across northern, central, and southern regions, as well as the islands. Situated Learning Theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991) could be useful for understanding the complexity of these movements. From this perspective,individuals who share ecological concerns and engage in collective struggles withina largely unsustainable society come together in Communities of Practice (CoPs), where learning is embedded in participation and shared action (Fabbri, 2007). Building on this framework, the present contribution tries to offer reflections derived from a naturalistic participatory observation approach (Trinchero, 2002, p.228) on the experience of participating in such CoP during PrimaVera Democrazia (First Real Democracy Spring), a seven-day action organized by XR Italy in Rome between May 29 and June 3, 2026. The action constituted a temporary yet highly visible learning environment in which nonviolent civil disobedience, were enacted in radical action (Fabbri & Melacarne, 2024). By examining these dynamics, this contribution argues that climate activism can be understood as an educative learning site through which ecological knowledge, democratic competencies, and collective identities are co-constructed. In this sense, praxis emerges as a form of learning grounded in participation, while action assumes a central role in fostering social transformation (Arendt, 1989).Through collective engagement, activists simultaneously prefigure alternativefutures and learn in the present, while maintaining the movement’s radical and conflictual relationship with dominant social and political structures.