A segunda vida da Praia dos Espanhóis: dançarinos, pescadores e turistas no sul de Portugal

Abstract: In this text, we deal with proccesses of appropriation of space in the Dam of Póvoa (Portugal) using a dwelling perspective (Ingold 2009) over the territory. The reconversion of innactive spaces in rural areas into leisure-related ones in a quite common practice in contemporary times.The Spaniards beach is one of the local names given by locals to the Dam of Póvoa (Castelo de Vide), in northern Alentejo (Portugal). In the collective memory of the residents, the Dam (built in the 1920’s) is remembered for the many flowers surrounding the area. This Garden-style aesthetics has outlived the initial function of the Dam (to produce electric power). From the 1960’s to the 1980’s, it was also a popular leisure space for Spanish and Portuguese people. It is not a beach, but being inland, it was the closest thing to a beach the residents had. The centrality of this leisure space in the area only decayed after the construction of swimming pools in the nearby towns. Early in the begginning of 21st century a fire destroyed part of the natural floral landscape of the dam. Abandoned for some years, the place has still been appropriated by leisured people in day-trips (for sight-seeing, pic-nics), fishing competitions, caravan soujorns, and, since 2013, in a music and dance festival named Andanças (www.andancas.net). The research that underlies this paper was carried out between 2013 and 2016 by a team of anthropologists. An ethnography of the Dam and its uses, and of the festival and its participants was carried out. In our working-paper we higlight the main research findings achieved. Key-words: Leisure; Landscape; Tourism; Music; Space; Portugal.

Zeitgeist or chameleon? A quantitative analysis of CSR definitions.

Despite its increasing relevance, corporate social responsibility (CSR) remains hobbled by problems, variously charged as being chameleon, vacuous or an utterly meaningless concept. One reason is the absence of an agreed upon normative basis underpinning CSR. This is in large part due to the concept lacking a universally accepted definition. This paper explores how the concept of CSR has evolved over time drawing from 110 definitions of the construct. Using co-word analysis of definitions from 1953 to 2014, the study maps how the structure of the definitions has evolved during the field's historical development. The research uncovers the key terms underpinning the phenomenon, the centrality of these terms as well as mapping their interrelationships and evolution. The findings suggest that, despite the profusion and definitional heterogeneity over the six decades of the development of the field, there are six recurrent, enduring dimensions that underpin the CSR concept. These dimensions are economic, social, ethical, stakeholders, sustainability and voluntary. This paper makes several contributions to the academic literature. The systematic, quantitative analysis of definitions brings an objectivity that previous qualitative bibliometric analyses of CSR have lacked. The time period selected is substantially longer than previous analyses and captures the complete historical evolution of the concept. Moreover, the analysis provides the basis for the development of a new, comprehensive, yet concise, definition of CSR that captures all six of the recurring dimensions underpinning the concept.

La convivialità urbana nei quartieri di Milano, Bologna e Roma. Un'analisi mixed-methods sulle Social Streets

Le Social Street sono gruppi di vicini di casa che vogliono ricreare legami di convivialità avendo notato un indebolimento delle relazioni sociali nei loro quartieri. Nascono come gruppi online, tramite la piattaforma Facebook, per materializzarsi in incontri offline andando a costruire legami conviviali grazie pratiche di socialità, inclusività e gratuità. Questa Tesi ha come obiettivo l’analisi dei profili socio-demografici degli Streeter e dei quartieri coinvolti per comprendere come sia possibile creare convivialità e come la variabile urbana intervenga in questi processi. Inoltre, si vuole comprendere le dinamiche di attaccamento al quartiere, gli interessi portati avanti dagli Streeter, il loro profilo civico e il posizionamento di quest’esperienza rispetto all’associazionismo tradizionale. Per perseguire l’obiettivo della ricerca, sono state studiate le tre città che vedono la maggiore presenza di Social Street: Milano, Bologna, Roma. La ricerca ha previsto sia un’analisi degli Streeter grazie a un questionario online replicato in tutti i contesti. Inoltre, sono state realizzate 131 interviste ad amministratori e fondatori di Social Street e condotte osservazioni etnografiche e netnografiche. I risultati mostrano come gli Streeter siano appartenenti alle classi medio-alte, tra trenta e cinquanta anni, che hanno sperimentato la mobilità tra un quartiere e l’altro o tra diversi contesi nazionali ed internazionali e trovano nelle Social Street un modo per creare legami di vicinato che hanno perso nei loro trasferimenti. Gli stessi quartieri dove si diffondono le Social Street sono agiati e vi è una buona corrispondenza tra Streeter e modello della centralità sociale elaborato da Milbrath (1965) per cui anche la partecipazione civica è molto sentita tra gli aderenti alle Social Street. Il contributo di questa Tesi al dibattito sociologico risiede nell’aver offerto un’analisi empirica di un’azione collettiva a livello urbano, quella delle Social Street, mostrando come vi sia circolarità tra azione e contesto grazie all’azione mutualistica conviviale.

Studies on the Hippo Pathway: new insights about a multifaceted signalling

The Hippo pathway is a well-known master regulator of cell growth and proliferation. Many studies have shed light on the centrality of Hippo functions, as this signalling is able to respond to different stimuli and translate them into distinct transcriptional outputs. Therefore, it is clearly implicated in a number of important processes, which alteration has consequences on the correct specification of the single cell, as well as the whole tissue. Even if the core of the signalling has been extensively characterized, it remains unclear which are the “co-workers” that permit the Hippo pathway to answer to so many different stimuli and act as a coordinator of the growth/differentiation balance. Taking advantage of the Drosophila model, which has witnessed most of the discoveries on this signalling pathway, this thesis aims to add some new knowledge about the Hippo pathway molecular mechanisms in different contexts, from development to disease. In the first part I studied the dynamics of the Hippo core kinase protein Warts in the development of the pupal eye. I have found out a critical time point in which the expression and the localization of Warts change suddenly, suggesting the intervention of upstream regulators modulating its activity in an extremely narrow time window. The second goal was investigating the role of the Hippo pathway in the neurodegenerative Gaucher disease. Indeed, I have produced some preliminary results which demonstrate a growth deficit associated with a massive reduction of some Yki targets, supporting a Hyper-Hippo condition underlying this neuropathic syndrome. Finally, I have evaluated the transcription factor Orthodenticle as a co-factor of Yorkie in driving tissue overgrowth, and my findings support a model of interaction of these two molecules based on Yki conformational changes. Altogether, my results lay the foundation for new important studies on the molecular mechanisms ruling Hippo pathway activity.

Essays on social networks, altruism and information diffusion

This dissertation consists of three standalone articles that contribute to the economics literature concerning technology adoption, information diffusion, and network economics in one way or another, using a couple of primary data sources from Ethiopia. The first empirical paper identifies the main behavioral factors affecting the adoption of brand new (radical) and upgraded (incremental) bioenergy innovations in Ethiopia. The results highlight the importance of targeting different instruments to increase the adoption rate of the two types of innovations. The second and the third empirical papers of this thesis, use primary data collected from 3,693 high school students in Ethiopia, and shed light on how we should select informants to effectively and equitably disseminate new information, mainly concerning environmental issues. There are different well-recognized standard centrality measures that are used to select informants. These standard centrality measures, however, are based on the network topology---shaped only by the number of connections---and fail to incorporate the intrinsic motivations of the informants. This thesis introduces an augmented centrality measure (ACM) by modifying the eigenvector centrality measure through weighting the adjacency matrix with the altruism levels of connected nodes. The results from the two papers suggest that targeting informants based on network position and behavioral attributes ensures more effective and equitable (gender perspective) transmission of information in social networks than selecting informants on network centrality measures alone. Notably, when the information is concerned with environmental issues.

Che cosa significa emancipazione? Organizzazione sociale, norme giuridiche e potere paterno dalla Rivoluzione francese agli anni Quaranta dell'Ottocento

La tesi presenta un’analisi storico-concettuale del concetto di emancipazione in Francia tra la Rivoluzione francese e gli anni Quaranta dell’Ottocento a partire dalla centralità delle donne nel processo rivoluzionario e dal problema del potere paterno e dell’ordine della famiglia. Da questa prospettiva viene ricostruito il momento di affermazione del significato moderno del concetto: prima con l’Illuminismo e poi con la Rivoluzione francese si determina un progressivo allargamento semantico che farà posto a significati politico-sociali inediti e a una serie di soggetti imprevisti. La Rivoluzione presenta infatti sulla scena un soggetto collettivo, già maturo, che dà forma all’emancipazione rivoluzionaria. Quest’ultima richiede una specifica scienza in grado di arginare i suoi effetti politici più pericolosi senza tradirne le premesse formali. A questo risponde l’Idéologie come scienza sociale sul finire della Rivoluzione. Se le donne in questi anni si mobilitano a partire dall’emancipazione rivoluzionaria, esse rappresentano al tempo stesso un problema fondamentale per l’ordine rivoluzionario come mostra il dibattito sul potere paterno che fa luce sul passaggio, fondamentale per il concetto di emancipazione, dal potere di emancipare del padre a quello dello Stato emancipatore. Gli esiti di questo dibattito si trovano nel Codice civile e nella sua emancipazione codificata, che definisce i confini giuridici e formali dell’emancipazione rivoluzionaria e le sue gerarchie. In seguito, la tesi ricostruisce le trasformazioni del concetto all’indomani della Rivoluzione nella dottrina di Saint-Simon e dei suoi allievi. Questa sarà all’origine del discorso che si sviluppa in Francia tra gli anni Trenta e Quaranta sul problema dell’emancipazione della donna che trova espressione negli scritti delle donne saint-simoniane. La tesi si ferma alle porte degli anni Quaranta quando l’emancipazione nel suo significato moderno si stabilizza e diventa un vero e proprio concetto di movimento, espressione di processi di emancipazione che si erano preparati negli anni precedenti.

Performing inclusion and exclusion in the peer group. Children's social organization and peer socializing practices in the classroom

This PhD thesis investigates children’s peer practices in two primary schools in Italy, focusing on the ordinary and the Italian L2 classroom. The study is informed by the paradigm of language socialization and considers peer interactions as a ‘double opportunity space’, allowing both children’s co-construction of their social organization and children’s sociolinguistic development. These two foci of attention are explored on the basis of children’s social interaction and of the verbal, embodied, and material resources that children agentively deploy during their mundane activities in the peer group. The study is based on a video ethnography that lasted nine months. Approximately 30 hours of classroom interactions were video-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed with an approach that combines the micro-analytic instruments of Conversation Analysis and the use of ethnographic information. Three main social phenomena were selected for analysis: (a) children’s enactment of the role of the teacher, (b) children’s reproduction of must-formatted rules, and (c) children’s argumentative strategies during peer conflict. The analysis highlights the centrality of the institutional frame for children’s peer interactions in the classroom. Moreover, the study illustrates that children socialize their classmates to the linguistic, social, and moral expectations of the context in and through various practices. Notably, these practices are also germane to the local negotiation of children’s social organization and hierarchy. Therefore, the thesis underlines that children’s peer interactions are both a resource for children’s sociolinguistic development and a potentially problematic locus where social exclusion is constructed and brought to bear. These insights are relevant for teachers’ professional practice. Children’s peer interactions are a resource that can be integrated in everyday didactics. Nevertheless, the role of the teacher in supervising and steering children’s peer practices appears crucial: an acritical view of children’s autonomous work, often implied in teaching methods such as peer tutoring, needs to be problematized.

A distributed middleware for IT/OT convergence in modern industrial environments

The modern industrial environment is populated by a myriad of intelligent devices that collaborate for the accomplishment of the numerous business processes in place at the production sites. The close collaboration between humans and work machines poses new interesting challenges that industry must overcome in order to implement the new digital policies demanded by the industrial transition. The Industry 5.0 movement is a companion revolution of the previous Industry 4.0, and it relies on three characteristics that any industrial sector should have and pursue: human centrality, resilience, and sustainability. The application of the fifth industrial revolution cannot be completed without moving from the implementation of Industry 4.0-enabled platforms. The common feature found in the development of this kind of platform is the need to integrate the Information and Operational layers. Our thesis work focuses on the implementation of a platform addressing all the digitization features foreseen by the fourth industrial revolution, making the IT/OT convergence inside production plants an improvement and not a risk. Furthermore, we added modular features to our platform enabling the Industry 5.0 vision. We favored the human centrality using the mobile crowdsensing techniques and the reliability and sustainability using pluggable cloud computing services, combined with data coming from the crowd support. We achieved important and encouraging results in all the domains in which we conducted our experiments. Our IT/OT convergence-enabled platform exhibits the right performance needed to satisfy the strict requirements of production sites. The multi-layer capability of the framework enables the exploitation of data not strictly coming from work machines, allowing a more strict interaction between the company, its employees, and customers.

Data surveillance for infectious diseases: models, complex networks and machine learning

In this thesis, we investigate the role of applied physics in epidemiological surveillance through the application of mathematical models, network science and machine learning. The spread of a communicable disease depends on many biological, social, and health factors. The large masses of data available make it possible, on the one hand, to monitor the evolution and spread of pathogenic organisms; on the other hand, to study the behavior of people, their opinions and habits. Presented here are three lines of research in which an attempt was made to solve real epidemiological problems through data analysis and the use of statistical and mathematical models. In Chapter 1, we applied language-inspired Deep Learning models to transform influenza protein sequences into vectors encoding their information content. We then attempted to reconstruct the antigenic properties of different viral strains using regression models and to identify the mutations responsible for vaccine escape. In Chapter 2, we constructed a compartmental model to describe the spread of a bacterium within a hospital ward. The model was informed and validated on time series of clinical measurements, and a sensitivity analysis was used to assess the impact of different control measures. Finally (Chapter 3) we reconstructed the network of retweets among COVID-19 themed Twitter users in the early months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. By means of community detection algorithms and centrality measures, we characterized users’ attention shifts in the network, showing that scientific communities, initially the most retweeted, lost influence over time to national political communities. In the Conclusion, we highlighted the importance of the work done in light of the main contemporary challenges for epidemiological surveillance. In particular, we present reflections on the importance of nowcasting and forecasting, the relationship between data and scientific research, and the need to unite the different scales of epidemiological surveillance.