Dialect 2 News
News from Naples
For several years now, Dialect has involved hundreds of adolescents of the Neapolitan metropolitan area in training processes and the application of capacity building to the world of sport. The first edition of the project worked to identify, and then combat through Football3, the forms of discrimination, exclusion, and violence present or potentially present in the world of football. In this second edition (Dialect2) what we are trying to do is to connect these issues, and the possible inclusive solutions we have identified, with another theme that fuels practices of discrimination and exclusion in the world of youth: the use of social media and new technologies.
“Violence” is not a word that should go together with others such as “sport” and “technology”, but in a historical phase in which young people find it difficult to embark on pathways alongside adults who can follow and guide them, this is happening more and more often. Over the past six months as ActionAid staff in Naples we accompanied a group of young community mediators (who had been players in the first edition of Dialect) to Oslo, to conclude a training course they had already started online and which had lasted several months. Once back here in Naples, we worked to share the tools that the boys and girls had learned with the even younger inhabitants of the Bagnoli neighbourhood, and we reunited the Dialect and Dialect2 paths through the moment that most pleases and gives joy to all: the Football3 tournaments.
Dialect2 will still be running, and we have a lot of work to do. We can’t wait to start using the ball and the smartphone (and other technological tools we are working on) together, to show once again that football is everyone’s and for everyone, and that we must work to ensure that everything, even the most beautiful and socialising things like sport and technology, are not if misused and in the wrong hands. See you soon on the fields and on these screens.
ActionAid Italy staff working on the Dialect2 project
