Occupied Turin Schools and the Question of Student Agency

Marco Meotto and Anita Romanello's piece for Doppiozero opens on two students guarding the gate of an occupied satellite building of the author's school in Turin, checking entrants one by one and asking anyone they could not confidently identify to display their electronic register page on a phone — an improvised but efficient security detail. Turin was tense the previous week: in some occupied institutes, groups of youths broke furniture, emptied fire extinguishers and then vanished. These documented incidents were amplified by social media chatter and sensationalist coverage into a kind of psychosis, and observers immediately hunted for instigators — some seeing an subversive hand, others crying infiltration. Both explanations, the authors argue, produced the same result: turning the students into pawns stripped of their own subjectivity. Watching that security detail alongside many other teachers, the authors frame the occupation as an expression of student self-organization rather than manipulation. The piece was published on 21 October 2026.