Surfing the Nation. Surf-lifestyle t-shirts and representations of Australian cultural identity

The essay aims to explore the ways an all-Australian surf lifestyle brand, Mambo, conveys the images and the representations of Australianness through its t-shirts and products in general. Essentially, Mambo is a Sydney based surf-wear label that specializes in bright t-shirts. Created in 1984, in less than a decade the label was generating an annual turnover of more than $10 million. While a Mambo montage might feature the conventional signifiers of Australian culture \u2013 like the beach, thongs, sprinklers, and Holdens \u2013 it is almost invariably underlined with a sharp satirical bite. The Mambo designers are generally obsessed with something that derives from, or connects with, the Australian experience. Also, Mambo has taken Australia\u2019s blunt approach to life and glorified it, in pure surfing subculture style. The essay tries to understand how the different signifiers of Australian cultural identity conveyed by Mambo products are produced and reproduced, ready to be received by both a national and a global community of surfers/consumers, also trying to explore how these ironical markers of Australianness represent a narrative of the different meanings of \u201cbeing Australian\u201d

Breaking the cycle of malaria treatment failure

Treatment of symptomatic malaria became a routine component of the clinical and public health response to malaria after the second world war. However, all antimalarial drugs deployed against malaria eventually generated enough drug resistance that they had to be removed from use. Chloroquine, sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, and mefloquine are well known examples of antimalarial drugs to which resistance did and still does ready evolve. Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) are currently facing the same challenge as artemisinin resistance is widespread in Southeast Asia and emerging in Africa. Here, I review some aspects of drug-resistance management in malaria that influence the strength of selective pressure on drug-resistant malaria parasites, as well as an approach we can take in the future to avoid repeating the common mistake of deploying a new drug and waiting for drug resistance and treatment failure to arrive. A desirable goal of drug-resistance management is to reduce selection pressure without reducing the overall percentage of patients that are treated. This can be achieved by distributing multiple first-line therapies (MFT) simultaneously in the population for the treatment of uncomplicated falciparum malaria, thereby keeping treatment levels high but the overall selection pressure exerted by each individual therapy low. I review the primary reasons that make MFT a preferred resistance management option in many malaria-endemic settings, and I describe two exceptions where caution and additional analyses may be warranted before deploying MFT. MFT has shown to be feasible in practice in many endemic settings. The continual improvement and increased coverage of genomic surveillance in malaria may allow countries to implement custom MFT strategies based on their current drug-resistance profiles

Non-kirchhoff vertices and nonlinear schrodinger ground states on graphs

We review some recent results and announce some new ones on the problem of the existence of ground states for the Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation on graphs endowed with vertices where the matching condition, instead of being free (or Kirchhoff's), is non-trivially interacting. This category includes Dirac's delta conditions, delta prime, Fulop-Tsutsui, and others

Frammenti di un discorso virale: Le cornici del coronavirus

The article argues that in order to make sense sociologically of the global pandemic of coronavirus it is less important to find a meaning to what is happening than to adopt the main meta-frame of estrangement: by doing so, we could be able to consider the present situation not in its ability to provide us with meanings, but in its ability to keep them alive. If this is to be a first (perhaps premature) meta-theoretical reflection on the pandemic in progress, then it must focus on the frames of coronavirus, and not on the interpretations they can refer to. The article tries to explore some of these frames; that of \u201crisk and blame\u201d, that of \u201cinvisibility and exclusion\u201d, and that of \u201c(im)mobility and acceleration\u201d. These frames are to be considered as preliminary \u201cfragments of a viral discourse\u201d, and they are all framed within the \u201cframe of frames\u201d, that of estrangement and cognitive displacement

Fast/Food. Appunti sul “gastro-motociclismo” televisivo

The article aims to explore a particular aspect of the relationship between food and gender \u2013 that is, the seemingly extravagant connection between celebrity (male) chefs, television cooking shows and motorcycles. This phenomenon, which Esperanza Miyake calls \u201cgastro-motorcyclism\u201d, is centered on the motorcycle as a \u201cmobile technology of gender\u201d, that means a disciplinary technique which regulates ideological and discursive systems about men and women and their conventional gender roles within society. The \u201cculinary motorcycle\u201d in television programs such as The Naked Chef, The Hairy Bikers, Feasting on Asphalt or in web series such as Food Biker both challenges and reinforces dominant gender and class ideologies surrounding cooking shows. Ultimately, \u201cgastro-motorcyclism\u201d enables the chef-rider to negotiate tensions surrounding culinary gender and class by providing what appears to be a counter-narrative against \u2013 but nonetheless supportive of \u2013 the more traditional and normative gendered television cooking shows

Exploring Tension in Hybrid Organizations in Times of Covid-19 Crisis. The Italian Benefit Corporations’ experience

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented social and economic crisis, not least for hybrid organisations, as they must manage the tension arising from their dual mission to create social and economic value. Building on a theoretical framework for hybrid tension, our work contextualises how tensions emerge and are managed in hybrid organisations when they are exposed to exogenous shocks. We address the following research question. How have hybrid organisations managed the tensions arising from their dual purpose during the COVID-19 crisis? Our focus is on Italian benefit corporations, which are organisations combining social and economic objectives. We conduct two focus groups with 12 Italian benefit corporations. Our findings show the emergence of four constructs that capture the responses to the COVID-19 crisis: social and/or commercial orientation; technological characterisation; internal and external stakeholder relationship; openness to changes. We explain the relationship of these constructs via a framework of performing, organising, learning, and belonging tensions

Do prosocial-certified companies walk the talk? An analysis of B Corps' contributions to Sustainable Development Goals

This paper investigates the contribution of the B Corp movement in Europe to achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) compared with non-B Corps. B Corp certification aims to identify organisations that utilise business as 'a force for good', but there is limited empirical evidence on how effectively certified organisations translate their prosocial claims into measurable SDG contributions. We address this through cluster analysis, comparing 313 B Corp-certified and 1506 non-certified European companies by way of the SDG Action Manager tool. Our findings reveal three clusters of B Corp-certified organisations with varying contribution levels across all SDGs, indicating that the certification does not consistently identify organisations with significant SDG impacts. Non-certified companies, meanwhile, do not exhibit distinct patterns. These results raise doubts about whether the B Corp category identifies a distinctive prototype member that can define clear prosocial norms and practices. The paper contributes to understanding B Corp organisations' narratives by providing insights into their empirical performance compared with non-certified organisations. It also offers potential explanations for these discrepancies and proposes strategies to strengthen B Corp certification bodies in alignment with the SDGs, while acknowledging the presence of intra-category variations

Fantasmagoria : l'archeologia dei media tra paure e rimozioni

L\u2019articolo si propone di presentare l\u2019archeologia dei media come un campo dei media studies che studia i new media attraverso l\u2019analisi del passato e attraverso uno scrutinio critico delle narrazioni progressive dominanti nella storia dei media. In particolare, il fuoco si concentra sull\u2019archeologia degli haunted media, le tecnologie perturbanti e i canali comunicativi che incrociano sulla propria strada lo strano e l\u2019inquietante

Mission, governance, and accountability of benefit corporations: Toward a commitment device for achieving commercial and social goals

Benefit corporations (BCs) are profit-with-purpose organizations regulated by a legal framework for establishing explicit commitments in terms of multi-stakeholder governance and accountability structures. We comprehensively analyze the theoretical alignment of four concepts (ownership, mission, governance, and accountability) to explain the legal rationale for BCs' unique corporate form. However, the boundaries of BC legislation are blurry, leaving them open to top-down governance arrangements and weak accountability. To explore this ambiguity, this paper investigates whether BCs implement a de facto (i.e., beyond the letter of the law) multi-stakeholder structure with governance models and downward accountability mechanisms that balance different stakeholders' interests, instead of focusing only on shareholder profits. This further highlight the soft boundaries imposed by the BC regulatory framework and suggests that more work is needed to explore the relationship between governance models that differently balance stakeholders' claims and the firm's social performance