Andrey Felipe Sgorla, Italian-Brazilian, is a researcher in Didactics and Educational Research at the Department of Social, Political, and Cognitive Sciences, University of Siena.
He holds two doctoral degrees — in Social Sciences (PUCRS, Brazil, 2021) and in Learning and Innovation in Social and Work Contexts (University of Siena, 2023) — with two theses that followed adults navigating non-linear transitions into craft professions in Brazil, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, often outside established institutional pathways.
His current research studies how professional futures become credible and actionable through educational experience and institutional arrangements, and why institutions recognise some of them — even when equally well sustained — but not others. Through an interdisciplinary approach that combines institutional ethnography, comparative biographical research and longitudinal inquiry, the research is organised in three lines.
The first — Vocational Imagination and Prospective Inequality — is the theoretical core: it distinguishes fictional fragility, when the narrative, conventional and relational supports of a future weaken, from fictional displacement, when a well-sustained future meets institutional non-recognition. These mechanisms inform the research on prospective inequality: how educational and institutional arrangements contribute to the unequal distribution of access to credible and actionable futures.
The second — Institutional Guidance, Educational Transitions and Recognition — is the empirical and pedagogical core: it examines how universities, training systems and guidance services organise the recognition of diverse trajectories, with attention to first-generation students, non-traditional students and working students, and to the mediating role of educators and guidance practitioners between individual trajectories, institutional expectations and available opportunities.
The third — Algorithmic Mediation and the Reconfiguration of Recognition — is a complementary line: it asks what happens to the practices of recognition identified in the first two lines when the evaluative judgement of educators and guidance practitioners is increasingly mediated by algorithmic systems, and whether that mediation expands or compresses the repertoire of futures institutions can recognise as credible.
He has conducted postdoctoral research at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and the University of Gastronomic Sciences, and has held Visiting Professor appointments involving teaching and research at universities in Brazil, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. He is also a member of the OECD expert group on AI augmentation in the workplace (2026–2027).