Social aspects of organic agriculture and other multifunctional benefits - Successful EU models compared with possibilities for organic developments in Croatia

Main objective of the dissertation is to illustrate how social and educational aspects (in close interaction with other multifunctional aspects in organic agriculture) which are developed on different multifunctional organic farms in Italy and Netherlands, as well as established agricultural policy frameworks in these countries, can be compared with the situation in Croatian organics and can contribute to further developent of organic issues in the Repubic of Croatia. So, through different chapters, the dissertation describes the performance of organic agriculture sectors in Italy, Netherlands and Croatia within the national agricultural policy frameworks, it analyzes the role of national institutions and policy in Croatia in connection with Croatia's status of candidate country for enterance into EU and harmonization of legislation with the CAP, as well as analyzes what is the role of national authorities, universities, research centres, but also of private initiatives, NGOs and cooperatives in organic agriculture in Netherlands, Italy and Croatia. Its main part describes how social and educational aspects are interacting with other multifunctional aspects in organic agriculture and analyzes the benefits and contribution of multifunctional activites performed on organic farms to education, healthy nourishment, environment protection and health care. It also assess the strengths and weaknesses of organic agriculture in all researched countries. The dissertation concludes with development opportunities for multifunctional organic agriculture in Croatia, as well as giving perspectives and recommendations for different approaches on the basis of experiences learned from successful EU models accompanied with some personal ideas and proposals.

Language and Embodiment: sensory-motor and linguistic-social experience. Evidence on sentence comprehension

In this work I address the study of language comprehension in an “embodied” framework. Firstly I show behavioral evidence supporting the idea that language modulates the motor system in a specific way, both at a proximal level (sensibility to the effectors) and at the distal level (sensibility to the goal of the action in which the single motor acts are inserted). I will present two studies in which the method is basically the same: we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: hand action vs. foot action vs. mouth action) and the effector by which participants had to respond (hand vs. foot vs. mouth; dominant hand vs. non-dominant hand). Response times analyses showed a specific modulation depending on the kind of sentence: participants were facilitated in the task execution (sentence sensibility judgment) when the effector they had to use to respond was the same to which the sentences referred. Namely, during language comprehension a pre-activation of the motor system seems to take place. This activation is analogous (even if less intense) to the one detectable when we practically execute the action described by the sentence. Beyond this effector specific modulation, we also found an effect of the goal suggested by the sentence. That is, the hand effector was pre-activated not only by hand-action-related sentences, but also by sentences describing mouth actions, consistently with the fact that to execute an action on an object with the mouth we firstly have to bring it to the mouth with the hand. After reviewing the evidence on simulation specificity directly referring to the body (for instance, the kind of the effector activated by the language), I focus on the specific properties of the object to which the words refer, particularly on the weight. In this case the hypothesis to test was if both lifting movement perception and lifting movement execution are modulated by language comprehension. We used behavioral and kinematics methods, and we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: the lifting of heavy objects vs. the lifting of light objects). To study the movement perception we measured the correlations between the weight of the objects lifted by an actor (heavy objects vs. light objects) and the esteems provided by the participants. To study the movement execution we measured kinematics parameters variance (velocity, acceleration, time to the first peak of velocity) during the actual lifting of objects (heavy objects vs. light objects). Both kinds of measures revealed that language had a specific effect on the motor system, both at a perceptive and at a motoric level. Finally, I address the issue of the abstract words. Different studies in the “embodied” framework tried to explain the meaning of abstract words The limit of these works is that they account only for subsets of phenomena, so results are difficult to generalize. We tried to circumvent this problem by contrasting transitive verbs (abstract and concrete) and nouns (abstract and concrete) in different combinations. The behavioral study was conducted both with German and Italian participants, as the two languages are syntactically different. We found that response times were faster for both the compatible pairs (concrete verb + concrete noun; abstract verb + abstract noun) than for the mixed ones. Interestingly, for the mixed combinations analyses showed a modulation due to the specific language (German vs. Italian): when the concrete word precedes the abstract one responses were faster, regardless of the word grammatical class. Results are discussed in the framework of current views on abstract words. They highlight the important role of developmental and social aspects of language use, and confirm theories assigning a crucial role to both sensorimotor and linguistic experience for abstract words.

La Pace Calda. La nascita del movimento antinucleare negli Stati Uniti e in Gran Bretagna, 1957-1963

The aim of this proposal is to offer an alternative perspective on the study of Cold War, since insufficient attention is usually paid to those organizations that mobilized against the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons. The antinuclear movement began to mobilize between the 1950s and the 1960s, when it finally gained the attention of public opinion, and helped to build a sort of global conscience about nuclear bombs. This was due to the activism of a significant part of the international scientific community, which offered powerful intellectual and political legitimization to the struggle, and to the combined actions of the scientific and organized protests. This antinuclear conscience is something we usually tend to consider as a fait accompli in contemporary world, but the question is to show its roots, and the way it influenced statesmen and political choices during the period of nuclear confrontation of the early Cold War. To understand what this conscience could be and how it should be defined, we have to look at the very meaning of the nuclear weapons that has deeply modified the sense of war. Nuclear weapons seemed to be able to destroy human beings everywhere with no realistic forms of control of the damages they could set off, and they represented the last resource in the wide range of means of mass destruction. Even if we tend to consider this idea fully rational and incontrovertible, it was not immediately born with the birth of nuclear weapons themselves. Or, better, not everyone in the world did immediately share it. Due to the particular climate of Cold War confrontation, deeply influenced by the persistence of realistic paradigms in international relations, British and U.S. governments looked at nuclear weapons simply as «a bullet». From the Trinity Test to the signature of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, many things happened that helped to shift this view upon nuclear weapons. First of all, more than ten years of scientific protests provided a more concerned knowledge about consequences of nuclear tests and about the use of nuclear weapons. Many scientists devoted their social activities to inform public opinion and policy-makers about the real significance of the power of the atom and the related danger for human beings. Secondly, some public figures, as physicists, philosophers, biologists, chemists, and so on, appealed directly to the human community to «leave the folly and face reality», publicly sponsoring the antinuclear conscience. Then, several organizations leaded by political, religious or radical individuals gave to this protests a formal structure. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Great Britain, as well as the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the U.S., represented the voice of the masses against the attempts of governments to present nuclear arsenals as a fundamental part of the international equilibrium. Therefore, the antinuclear conscience could be defined as an opposite feeling to the development and the use of nuclear weapons, able to create a political issue oriented to the influence of military and foreign policies. Only taking into consideration the strength of this pressure, it seems possible to understand not only the beginning of nuclear negotiations, but also the reasons that permitted Cold War to remain cold.