Questioning while walking: the ‘disobedient movement’, and the centro sociale revolta in Italy

This thesis examines the organisational principles, repertoires of contention, practices, and the political culture of the Centro Sociale Occupato Rivolta as an expression of the Disobedient movement. The study, which is based on 42 interviews, participant observation and original documents, discusses the main theories on social movements which combine different theoretical perspectives, namely resource mobilisation, new social movements and the theory of political opportunity structure. Providing a definition of CSO as a convenient name to indicate a number of profoundly heterogeneous experiences that rely on illegal occupations of empty buildings and the principle of self-management, the study interprets the Rivolta as a proactive subject and political entrepreneur. These two concepts refer to the attempt of the Rivolta to overcome their identity as a new-left organisation, its ability of mobilising symbolic and material resources and to its continuous change and development. The case of the Rivolta shows that a movement actor has to continually 'destroy' old conditions and create new ones in order to survive and expand. The combination of different theoretical approaches and the analysis of the Rivolta has allowed the research to highlight some specific issues. Firstly, this movement area has overcome the dichotomy between conflict for recognition and for socio-economic resource distribution. While the Rivolta is an actor that mobilises resources, it also aims to promote its autonomous cultural identity and to extend social and political rights in society. Secondly, the relations between local and national institutions and the Disobedient movement area, far from being linear, either in terms of conflict or dialogue, are changeable and discontinuous. The study shows that the extra-institutional advocacy of this movement network still persists and has been combined with institutional participation. Finally, the thesis shows that the movement area to which the Rivolta belongs, in exploiting the opportunities offered by the general context, has set its struggles, claims and protests both at the local and the global dimension, marginalising national issues and targets

Dominant or subordinate? The relational dynamics in a protest cycle for undocumented migrant rights

This article investigates an undocumented migrants’ protest hat took place in Italy in 2010–2011 and examines the relational dynamics within the movement behind this mobilization. Although there is growing literature exploring different aspects of migrant activism and border struggles, the binomial migrant and politics has mostly been interpreted in terms of migrants as the objects of politics rather than the subjects. During the nine month protest a similar argument was used by authorities who recurrently stated that the migrants were remotely controlled and manipulated by their Italian advocates. Without underestimating differences in social and cultural capital and power relations within the movement, this article seeks to challenge this approach and problematize the relationship between the actors who organized and participated in the protest. Drawing on 27 in-depth interviews with documented and undocumented migrants and migrant rights activists, the article aims to show how relational dynamics go beyond the subordination–domination dichotomy

Labor, citizenship, and subjectivity: migrants’ struggles within the Italian crisis

This article contributes to the study of migration and politics in Italy through the analysis of three contentious cycles that took place between 2010 and 2011: the “a day without us” general strike of migrants on March 1, 2010, the occupation by six migrants of a crane in central Brescia for 17 days in November 2010, and the mobilization of seasonal worker migrants in the green district of Manduria in Puglia in summer 2011. These cycles of protest raised a number of issues related to citizenship rights, freedom of circulation in a globalized world, labor exploitation, and the link between migrant workers and hosting societies. Although they were highly localized and had little national coordination, these protests showed the emergence of migrant workers as autonomous political actors and the link between migration citizenship and labor within a growing multiethnic society. The first part of the article looks at the dynamics of migration and the incorporation of migrants in the Italian economy. The second part focuses on the issues raised by migrants and the subjectivities engaged in these cycles of protest, and the organizational structures of protest. These struggles posit migrants as political subjects and their analysis offers a way out of conceiving mobility in terms of coercion or simply as an economically induced phenomenon to look at the autonomy of migration and migrants as political actors

The two emergencies of migrant-related policies in Italy during the first wave of COVID-19: The spread of the virus and the workforce shortages

Italy was the first European country touched by COVID-19 and one of the most severely affected, with a death toll that overtook China's by mid-March 2020. As a result, lockdown measures aiming to mitigate-and eventually interrupt-the spread of COVID-19 proliferated during the first wave of the pandemic. The vast majority of these concerned the resident population, regardless of their status or country of origin, and mainly involved the closure of public offices and proscrip-tion of private activities with the aim of reducing mobility and social and physical contacts. Only a few concerned the foreign population and arriving irregular migrants. This article analyses migrant-related policy measures taken by the Ital-ian government during the first wave of the pandemic that aimed to prevent infection and reduce the impact of COVID-19 among the population. These measures addressed two emergencies: the spread of COVID-19 that hit the resident population hard, regardless of origin or nationality, and the workforce shortages in some key economic sectors with a high number of irregular migrant workers. The former aimed at containing the spread of the virus (sections 4 and 5) and targeted foreigners already residing in Italy as well as irregular migrants arriving along the Mediterra-nean route; the latter aimed at addressing workforce shortages (section 6) as a result of borders that were closed to external seasonal migration. This article is a contribution to the debate on changes to migration and migrant policy, and how these impacted on migration and foreign populations during the pandemic

Quarantine ships as spaces of bordering: The securitization of migration policy in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity for bordering, that is, for measures that aim to delineate foreigners’ access to citizenship and membership and to further securitize migration policy. Across the globe, new border controls were introduced, stringent new international regulations applied, and hundreds of thousands of flights cancelled, all of which resulted in millions of travelers, including migrant workers and transnational commuters, being stranded. Among the areas affected by these bordering measures is the central Mediterranean migratory route to Italy. In Spring 2020, the Italian government introduced two measures aimed to block migrant arrivals by sea: the closure of ports to search-and-rescue (SAR) operations and the use of ships to quarantine migrants arriving on SAR ships. While the former was only partially implemented and then lifted in the summer of 2020, the latter has become a cornerstone of current securitization policies in Italy. This article — relying on semi-structured interviews with activists, non-governmental organization volunteers, human rights lawyers, and journalists — interrogates the use of quarantine ships during the pandemic as a means of stopping COVID-19's spread by irregular migrants arriving along the central Mediterranean. It shows how this measure, presented as a humanitarian mission to preserve public health, became an opportunity to securitize national and EU borders and how quarantine ships became spaces aimed at filtering and containing arriving migrants. The article aims to contribute to the debate around the bordering policy measures that characterize current EU migration governance and to consider their application during the pandemic

For a new Sociology of Social love

Love is a theme at the centre of all our lives, including those of sociologists and social scientists. It has been widely addressed and described in literature and poetry, extensively depicted in the pictorial arts, sung about in music. Even philosophy, from its very beginnings, has devoted beautiful and intense pages to this theme. For reasons difficult to understand, the founding fathers of our discipline have been reluctant to enter the analytical realm of love. They touched this theme, but only marginally. It is only relatively recently that more insightful and focused discussions have come from some key figures of contemporary sociology in works by Niklas Luhmann, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Zygmunt Bauman and, more recently, Eva Illouz that demonstrate the profoundly social nature of our most intimate feelings and convey how the transformation of love and intimacy is related to wider social changes. In this sense, this collection edited by Silvia Cataldi and Gennaro Iorio aims to fill a major gap, while fuelling the debate on social love and its implications as a transformative force in an era characterised by multiple crises. By bringing together scholars from across several countries, not only it collates the fruit of years of research, but it also launches new developments in the debate on social love and set a new research agenda

A Path Integral Way to Option Pricing

An efficient computational algorithm to price financial derivatives is presented. It is based on a path integral formulation of the pricing problem. It is shown how the path integral approach can be worked out in order to obtain fast and accurate predictions for the value of a large class of options, including those with path-dependent and early exercise features. As examples, the application of the method to European and American options in the Black-Scholes model is illustrated. A particularly simple and fast semi-analytical approximation for the price of American options is derived. The results of the algorithm are compared with those obtained with the standard procedures known in the literature and found to be in good agreement.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Editors' introduction: conflicts within the crisis

Introduction to Social Justice Special Issue, Conflicts within the Crisis

Thinking Lampedusa: border construction, the spectacle of bare life and the productivity of migrants

This article interrogates the relationship between the Italian island of Lampedusa and trans-Mediterranean migration. It explores how the construction of Lampedusa as a border zone has been implicated in the rise and fall in numbers of migrants reaching the island’s shores over the last two decades. It proceeds to consider the appropriateness of interpreting death and detention on Lampedusa in terms of ‘bare life’. While acknowledging how Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of bare life has been problematized in relation to irregular migration and taking into account the frequent acts of migrants’ political agency on the island itself, it is argued that the transformation of Lampedusa by the media and political establishment into a spectacle of bare life is not only instrumental to the functioning of migration management at Europe’s southern border but is also constitutive of the subordinate position of migrants in Italian society and its labour market

Rappresentanza e autorganizzazione: il "welfare dal basso" dei CSA del Nord-Est

I CSA: lo spazio conteso nelle città; CSA e critica della rappresentanza; Critica della rappresentanza, autorganizzazione e welfare dal basso; Welfare dal basso e autorganizzazione; Conclusioni