Landscapes of our uncertain futures: Towards mapping and understanding crisis-related concepts and definitions

This report "Landscapes of Our Uncertain Futures. Towards mapping and understanding crisis-related concepts and definitions" is published as a result of a literature review and related conceptual analysis conducted within the RESCUE Project (Real Estate in Sustainable Crisis Management in Urban Environments). In early stages of the project it became evident that in order to achieve efficient results in research and policy action efforts for sustainable urban development and crisis management, mutual understanding of key concepts and their definitions is needed. This is because identifying and grasping the major phenomena at play in our turbulent world – crisis society – may be varied, and besides there are several different definitions of them used in the literature. If, however, preliminary discussions and analyses can open up the contents and meanings of such phenomena, joint work and concluding recommendations are supported and expedited on the basis of shared understanding. A key theme in this conceptual analysis is 'crisis' and crisis-related phenomena, within the framework of the now present VUCA world. The landscapes of our uncertain futures are thus depicted, and replenished via a literature review and its key findings. These insights are meant to help paving the way for the process of creating resilient cities

Cultural and Political Geographies of the AIDS Crisis in Ireland

This thesis is a geographical study of the cultural and political performances of AIDS in Ireland. It takes, in particular, an institutional/ organisational approach to focus on the practices of the state and non-state sector and their interaction with the ‘AIDS’ body through two embodied practices; AIDS Quilting and blood donation. Drawing on a Butlerian conceptualisation of precarity and precariousness, it configures a landscape of HIV/AIDS care provision that is implicated in the production of the precarious body and the precarity of the state. My study of Irish AIDS Quilts explores the practice of AIDS Quilting among voluntary HIV/AIDS organisations that have been operating within a context overshadowed by religious moralization, and shaped by an inequitable geographical distribution of disease. I begin by locating Ireland’s AIDS Quilting projects within the context of Ireland’s HIV voluntary organisations, I then take up three geographical expressions of precarity that we can see communicated in the Quilt; a stigmatising state, a queer diaspora and a precarity of-place. Through an institutional ethnography of interviews with Quilt producers, ethnographic observation of the quilts aesthetic properties, and documentary research, this example demonstrates that Ireland’s attempts to memorialize marginalised collectives is at variance from other cultural contexts with a more visible and arguably more insurgent gay community, such as the United States. My second example focuses on the practice of blood donation in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis and examines how the cultural memory of AIDS continues to affect the institutionalised culture of the Irish Blood Transfusion Service, where tactics of governmentality are expressed and experienced spatially with a particular impact on the bodies of non-normative subjects. Overall, the thesis elucidates a complex relationship between the body, state service and voluntary organisation, determining in particular that the state sector above all, continues to be instrumental for inducing precarity on the bodies most affected by the AIDS crisis

Landscapes of our uncertain futures: Towards mapping and understanding crisis-related concepts and definitions

This report "Landscapes of Our Uncertain Futures. Towards mapping and understanding crisis-related concepts and definitions" is published as a result of a literature review and related conceptual analysis conducted within the RESCUE Project (Real Estate in Sustainable Crisis Management in Urban Environments). In early stages of the project it became evident that in order to achieve efficient results in research and policy action efforts for sustainable urban development and crisis management, mutual understanding of key concepts and their definitions is needed. This is because identifying and grasping the major phenomena at play in our turbulent world – crisis society – may be varied, and besides there are several different definitions of them used in the literature. If, however, preliminary discussions and analyses can open up the contents and meanings of such phenomena, joint work and concluding recommendations are supported and expedited on the basis of shared understanding. A key theme in this conceptual analysis is 'crisis' and crisis-related phenomena, within the framework of the now present VUCA world. The landscapes of our uncertain futures are thus depicted, and replenished via a literature review and its key findings. These insights are meant to help paving the way for the process of creating resilient cities.</p

Precarious citizenship: Rights claims of EU migrants in the UK

EU citizenship comprises a set of rights, but it is most closely associated with free movement across member states. However, while free movers formally enjoy equal civil, social, economic and residence rights throughout the European Union, informal application of these rights is spatially uneven. Further, political rights of EU citizens remain curtailed as free movers usually cannot vote in national elections in their country of residency, but they can vote in local and external elections. This dynamic of inclusion and exclusion generates a democratic deficit, but it also produces emergent spaces of political action. My thesis engages with this opening to analyse how EU migrant citizens claim their electoral, socioeconomic, and residence rights in Bristol: a culturally and economically vibrant English city, where the density of migrant networks generates a fertile ground for both political engagement and engaged research. The study is theoretically informed by geographic and political literatures on citizenship and interdisciplinary citizenship studies – with the acts of citizenship approach being particularly useful – as well as social and political theory. It is empirically grounded in the English context and relies on qualitative, place-based research in Bristol. This includes interviews and ethnography with migrant voters and political campaigners, and interviews with labour and community organisers. Data collection took place over an extended period before and after the EU referendum. The thesis distinguishes between the means and modes of political action. The means are defined as organised social practices that enable acts of citizenship, and include voting, organising, and campaigning. Three overarching modes of claiming European rights emerge through this analysis, and they include enactments along, across, and beyond national frames. In this way, personal and collective rights claims serve as empirical proxies, or windows onto, European migrant citizenship. The thesis argues that vulnerability is a powerful catalyst for political action unfolding through citizenship. It also shows that acts of citizenship, while often cast as revolutionary moments, are in fact processual and iterative. Citizenship understood in this way endows individuals with capacities and infrastructures to collectively learn, question, and rebel – to identify matters of concern, to identify sites of intensive relations of power, and to articulate interests and take action

National security implications of Chinese FDIs: United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and France as host states (2006-2016)

1Dottorato di Ricerca in Politics: History, Theory, Science (XXXII ciclo), Luiss Guido Carli, Roma, 2020. Relatore: Prof. Leonardo Morlino.openNational Security threats of inward FDIs. Chinese authoritarian capitalism and outward investment behavior. National security and political implications of Chinese OFDIs.openDottorato di ricerca in Politics: History, Theory, ScienceZingoni, LetiziaZingoni, Letizi

The Moral Mappings of South and North

What is the 'Global South' and where is it? The term 'Global South' marks a new attempt at providing order and meaning in the current global political constellation, replacing the term 'Third World'. But the term 'Global South' is fraught with many ambiguities. This book explores the possible meanings of this new distinction and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of adopting it for understanding the contemporary world. It casts a wide exploratory net, looking at how the way that we interpret the world has changed over time

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma

Biopolitics of Climate Change: Carbon Commodities, Environmental Profanations, and the Lost Innocence of Use-Value

The analytical core of this study is the historical development of the relationship between nature and the capitalist mode of production. In particular, we aim at shedding light on the process through which the “grammar” of ecological crisis (and consequently of its possible solutions) turned into an exclusively economic one. In addressing this issue we discuss the successive problematisations of the environment that took place since the emergence of biopolitical governmentality (late Eighteenth century). Following Foucault\u27s intuition, and supplementing it with aspects of Marxist analysis, we argue for a profound transformation – based on a crucial leap of abstraction – of the notion of nature: from enacting limit to the economic process to fundamental element of market valorisation. Especially, we show how this modification discloses a new way to approach contemporary commodification, organised around the crucial notion of general intellect. Carbon commodities, for instance, should be conceived of as second order abstractions: in them, the differentiation between natural distinctness of use-value and economic equivalence of exchange value tends to blur since a decisive element of their exchange-value resides in the ex ante creation of capital-based use-values. Hence, use-value loses its innocence. The neoliberalisation of nature is analysed – with specific regard to the climate crisis – both from the perspective of its supporters (carbon traders), and from the standpoint of its critics (climate justice activists). Carbon trading – and the dogma upon which it rests – is understood as a material-discursive device through which climate change is seen as a market failure whose only possible solution lies, paradoxically, in further implementing market-based policies. By contrast, climate resistance is the multifarious disarticulation of this dogma. Such a transnational movement is approached through the concept of carbon profanations, which simultaneously possesses a deconstructive component – whose aim is to disarticulate the supports of carbon trading dogma – and a creative element – whose goal is to establish concrete-prefigurative organisational configurations, irreducible to a regime of truth centred around the marketisation of global warming. Finally, an empirical analysis of Durban\u27s COP17 is proposed as a background against which to interpret the transformative potential of climate struggles, with particular focus on the notion of planetary climate as a global common/s