Media activism on and off line by Italian adolescents and young adults

From several researchers it appears that Italian adolescents and young people are grown up with commercial television which is accused to contain too much violence, sex, reality shows, advertising, cartoons which are watched from 1 to 4 hours daily. Adolescents are also great users of mobile phones and spend a lot of time to use it. Their academic results are below the average of Ocse States. However the widespread use of communication technology and social networks display also another side of adolescents who engage in media activism and political movement such as Ammazzateci tutti!, Indymedia, Movimento 5 Stelle, Movimento No Tav. In which way does the world economic crisis -with the specific problems of Italy as the cutting founds for school, academic research and welfare, the corruption of political class, mafia and camorra organisation induce a reaction in our adolescents and young people? Several researches inform us about their use of internet in terms of spending time but, more important, how internet, and the web 2.0, could be an instrument for their reaction? What do they do online? How they do it? Which is the meaning of their presence online? And, has their online activity a continuity offline? The research aims are: 1. Trough a participant observation of Social Network profiles opened by 10 young active citizens, I would seek to understand which kind of social or political activities they engage in online as individuals and which is the meaning of their presence online. 2. To observe and understand if adolescents and young people have a continuity of their socio-political engagement online in offline activities and which kind of experiences it is. 3. Try to comprehend which was (or which were) the significant, learning experiences that convinced them about the potential of the web as tool for their activism.

La governance dei rifiuti in Europa. Territori, conflitti e partecipazione

I rifiuti come oggetti impegnano tutte le istituzioni umane in una lotta di definizione del posto che occupano e quindi del valore che assumono. In tale dinamica la gestione dei rifiuti diventa un fatto sociale totale che coinvolge tutte le istituzioni umane in una lotta di definizione territorializzata. La storia del movimento ambientalista ci mostra come partendo dal disagio nei confronti dell���oggetto si �� passati ad un disagio nei confronti delle idee che lo generano. Modernizzazione ecologica e modernizzazione democratica sembrano andare per un certo periodo d���accordo. Nei casi di conflittualit�� recente, e nello studio di caso approfondito di un piano provinciale della gestione rifiuti, il carattere anticipatore dell���attivismo ambientalista, sta rendendo sempre pi�� costosi e incerti, investimenti e risultati strategici . Anche i principi delle politiche sono messi in discussione. La sostenibilit�� �� da ricercare in una relativizzazione dei principi di policy e degli strumenti tecnici di valutazione (e.g. LCA) verso una maggiore partecipazione di tutti gli attori. Si propone un modello di governance che parta da un coordinamento amministrativo territoriale sulle reti logistiche, quindi un adeguamento geografico degli ATO, e un loro maggior ruolo nella gestione del processo di coordinamento e pianificazione. Azioni queste che devono a loro volta aprirsi ai flussi (ecologici ed economici) e ai loro attori di riferimento: dalle aziende multiutility agli ambientalisti. Infine �� necessario un momento di controllo democratico che pu�� avere una funzione arbitrale nei conflitti tra gli attori o di verifica. La ricerca si muove tra la storia e la filosofia, la ricerca empirica e la riflessione teorica. Sono state utilizzate anche tecniche di indagine attiva, come il focus group e l���intervista.

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.

'Defending the rights'. An integrated model of collective action for "public water" in Italy

In many communities, supplying water for the people is a huge task and the fact that this essential service can be carried out by the private sector respecting the right to water, is a debated issue. This dissertation investigates the mechanisms through which a 'perceived rights violation' - which represents a specific form of perceived injustice which derives from the violation of absolute moral principles ��� can promote collective action. Indeed, literature on morality and collective action suggests that even if many people apparently sustain high moral principles (like human rights), only a minority decides to act in order to defend them. Taking advantage of the political situation in Italy, and the recent mobilization for "public water" we hypothesized that, because of its "sacred value", the perceived violation of the right to water facilitates identification with the social movement and activism. Through five studies adopting qualitative and quantitative methods, we confirmed our hypotheses demonstrating that the perceived violation of the right to water can sustain activism and it can influence vote intentions at the referendum for 'public water'. This path to collective action coexists with other 'classical' predictors of collective action, like instrumental factors (personal advantages, efficacy beliefs) and anger. The perceived rights violation can derive both from personal values (i.e. universalism) and external factors (i.e. a mobilization campaign). Furthermore, we demonstrated that it is possible to enhance the perceived violation of the right to water and anger through a specifically designed communication campaign. The final chapter summarizes the main findings and discusses the results, suggesting some innovative line of research for collective action literature.

Storie di vita e rivoluzione. Biografie e autobiografie di comunardi (1871-1886)

Nell'ambito di un'indagine sull'identit�� del rivoluzionario nel XIX secolo, calata tra gli attivisti coinvolti nella Comune di Parigi, si �� trattato di selezionare quelle autobiografie scritte e pubblicate da comunardi come parte integrante della loro attivit�� politica, e cos�� porre il problema del rapporto tra pratica autobiografica e rivoluzione, ovvero chiarire le condizioni del passage au r��cit, la scelta autobiografica e insieme la mise en intrigue tra esperienze individuali e rivoluzione. Questa ricerca si presenta dunque come un lavoro sulle pratiche autobiografiche all'interno delle pratiche di attivismo politico, ovvero pi�� specificamente sulla relazione tra autobiografia e rivoluzione. In altri termini si analizza il modo in cui i rivoluzionari narravano la loro identit�� in pubblico, perch�� lo avessero fatto e cosa veicolavo in termini di stili di vita e convinzioni particolari. In quanto rivoluzionari, l'autobiografia diviene fonte e parte di ci�� che essi reputavano in quel momento la propria traiettoria rivoluzionaria, la narrazione di quella che in quel momento ritenevano comunicare al pubblico come propria identit�� narrativa. La ricerca si articola in tre momenti. Nel primo capitolo analizzo le biografie, o meglio un piccolo gruppo tra la massa di biografie di comunardi edite all'indomani della Comune da parte della pubblicistica tanto ostile quanto partigiana della Comune. Queste narrazioni biografiche diffuse nei mesi successivi alla repressione della rivoluzione comunalista consentono di affrontare una delle condizioni fondamentali del passage au r��cit autobiografico che si manifester�� solo posteriormente. Il secondo e il terzo capitolo sono dedicati a due progetti autobiografici di diversa natura: la trilogia autobiografica di Jules Vall��s (1879, 1881, 1886) e le M��moires di Louise Michel (1886).

Labour, LGBT* rights, and Europe. Discourses in Italy and Serbia

At the time of writing, all three elements that are evoked in the title ��� emancipation and social inclusion of sexual minorities, labour and labour activism, and the idea and substance of ���Europe��� ��� are being invested by deep, long-term, and ��� to varied degrees ��� radical processes of social transformation. The meaning of words like ���equality���, ���rights���, ���inclusion���, and even ���democracy��� is as precarious and uncertain as are the lives of those European citizens who are marginalised by intersecting conditions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class ��� in a constellation of precarities that is both unifying and fragmented (fragmenting). Conflicts are played, in hidden or explicit ways, over material processes of redistribution as well as discursive practices that revolve around these words. Against this backdrop, and roughly ten years after the European Union provided an input for institutional commitment to the protection of LGBT* workers' rights with the Council Directive 2000/78/EC, the dissertation contrasts discourses on workplace equality for LGBT* persons produced by a plurality of actors, seeking to identify values, semantics, and agendas framing and informing organisations��� views and showing how each actor has incorporated LGBT* rights into its own discourse, each time in a way that is functional to the construction and/or confirmation of its organisational identity: transnational union networks, by presenting LGBT* rights as a natural, neutral commitment within the framework of universal human rights protection; left-wing organisations, by collocating activism for LGBT* rights within a wider project of social emancipation that is for all the marginalised, yet is not neutral, but attached to specific values and opposed to specific political adversaries (the right-wing, the nationalists); business networks, by acknowledging diversity as a path to better performance and profits, thus encouraging inclusion and non-discrimination of ���deserving��� LGBT* workers.

Tra pacifismo e ambientalismo: il Nuclear Freeze Movement e la risposta dell'amministrazione Reagan

Negli anni Ottanta si assiste tanto nel vecchio quanto nel nuovo continente alla rinascita del movimento antinucleare. Mentre in Europa l���origine di questa ondata di proteste antinucleari �� collegata alla ���doppia decisione��� NATO del 1979, negli Stati Uniti la genesi si colloca nel contesto dalla mobilitazione dei gruppi ambientalisti in seguito all���incidente alla centrale nucleare di Three Mile Island. Dopo l���elezione di Ronald Reagan, alle proteste contro le applicazioni pacifiche dell���atomo si affiancarono quelle contro la politica nucleare del Paese. La retorica di Reagan, il massiccio piano di riarmo, unitamente al rinnovato deteriorarsi delle relazioni tra USA e URSS contribuirono a diffondere nell���opinione pubblica la sensazione che l���amministrazione Reagan, almeno da un punto di vista teorico, non avesse escluso dalle sue opzioni il ricorso alle armi nucleari nel caso di un confronto con l���URSS. I timori legati a questa percezione produssero una nuova ondata di proteste che assunsero dimensioni di massa grazie alla mobilitazione provocata dalla Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (NWFC). Il target della NWFC era l���ampio programma di riarmo nucleare sostenuto da Reagan, che secondo gli attivisti nucleari, in un quadro di crescenti tensioni internazionali, avrebbe fatto aumentare le possibilit�� di uno scontro atomico. Per evitare lo scenario dell���olocausto nucleare, la NWFC proponeva ��un congelamento bilaterale e verificabile del collaudo, dell���installazione e della produzione di armi nucleari��. L���idea del nuclear freeze, che era concepito come un passo per fermare la spirale del riarmo e tentare successivamente di negoziare riduzioni negli arsenali delle due superpotenze, riscosse un tale consenso nell���opinione pubblica americana da indurre l���amministrazione Reagan a formulare una risposta specifica. Durante la primavera del 1982 fu, infatti, creato un gruppo interdipartimentale ad hoc, l���Arms Control Information Policy Group, con il compito di arginare l���influenza della NWFC sull���opinione pubblica americana e formulare una risposta coerente alle critiche del movimento antinucleare.