Environment and neoliberalism: a critical discourse analysis of three Italian cases

In this paper we will examine the economic integration of environmental discourses using three examples chosen among the three main administrative levels of Italian State: central, regional and municipal. Through the application of Critical Discourse Analysis tools, an interdisciplinary research approach that combines linguistic analysis and social theory, the paper will analyze discursive strategies, interests at stake, use of language and changes of meanings. The selected texts will be interpreted as spaces of representation and social interaction, within an order of discourse dominated by the neoliberal frame

Gas organization in M51 - The impact of spiral arm dynamics on Giant Molecular Cloud properties

Recent observations have shown that star formation is correlated with the molecular phase of the interstellar medium. Molecular gas tends to organize itself into large and roughly self-gravitating entities called Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs). These objects should, therefore, play a key role in controlling star formation and defining its modes. However, their physical properties, formation and evolution mechanisms are still poorly understood - especially in spiral galaxies. The new PdBI Arcsecond Whirlpool Survey (PAWS) offers, for the first time, the possibility to study the molecular gas distribution in a grand-design spiral galaxy dominated by dynamical phenomena. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the importance of galactic environments for the gas organization. Via a thorough analysis of the gas kinematics I study the structure of M51’s gravitational potential and spiral arm streaming motions. This analysis provides several insights on the differing nature of the molecular and atomic phase of the interstellar medium. I also find evidence for a kinematic m = 3 mode that explains the asymmetry of the spiral arms. To investigate the effect of the dynamical environment on the molecular gas I have generated the largest extragalactic GMC catalog to date using an automatic algorithm that accounts for the observational biases. Differences in the cloud properties suggest that environments, and in particular dynamical effects, strongly influence the organization of the gas in spiral galaxies and provide a way to discriminate between the various mechanisms of cloud formation and evolution that have been proposed in the literature

The inner mass distribution of late-type spiral galaxies from SAURON stellar kinematic maps

We infer the central mass distributions within 0.4-1.2 disc scale lengths of 18 late-type spiral galaxies using two different dynamical modelling approaches - the Asymmetric Drift Correction (ADC) and axisymmetric Jeans Anisotropic Multi-gaussian expansion (JAM) model. ADC adopts a thin disc assumption, whereas JAM does a full line-of-sight velocity integration. We use stellar kinematics maps obtained with the integral-field spectrograph SAURON to derive the corresponding circular velocity curves from the two models. To find their best-fit values, we apply Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. ADC and JAM modelling approaches are consistent within 5% uncertainty when the ordered motions are significant comparable to the random motions, i.e, $\overline{v_{\phi}}/\sigma_R$ is locally greater than 1.5. Below this value, the ratio $v_\mathrm{c,JAM}/v_\mathrm{c,ADC}$ gradually increases with decreasing $\overline{v_{\phi}}/\sigma_R$, reaching $v_\mathrm{c,JAM}\approx 2 \times v_\mathrm{c,ADC}$. Such conditions indicate that the stellar masses of the galaxies in our sample are not confined to their disk planes and likely have a non-negligible contribution from their bulges and thick disks.Comment: 44 pages, 60 figures, MNRAS accepted. The ADC-MCMC and JAM-MCMC python codes are available at: https://github.com/Kalinova/Dyn_models. The Multi-Gaussian Expansion (MGE) results are also available in the Appendi