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Passeurs: Narratives of Border Crossing in the Western Alps
This article focuses on representations of passeurs: migrant smugglers across the French-Italian and Swiss-Italian borders. I analyze a heterogeneous corpus of novels, films, and essays published between 1990-2017 that refer to different waves of migration, from World War II to the contemporary migration crisis. I argue that these texts complicate and help question the current criminalization of migrant smugglers most often found in the media and political discourses. In particular, I claim that these discourses confuse or dismiss migrantsâ experience of border crossing, as they neglect important ethical and legal differences between smuggling and trafficking, humanitarian actors and professional smugglers. The texts I analyze insist on these nuances, enriching our understanding of the human stakes of âillegalâ migrations. Through the analysis of literature and film, I present figures of migrant smugglers who have operated illegally to facilitate migrants, but who must not be confused with human traffickers. For example, in his bio-fiction Il vuoto alle spalle (1999), journalist Marco A. Ferrari gives an uplifting, idealized portrayal of Ettore Castiglioni, an Anti-Fascist Alpinist active during World War II, who smuggled Italian Jews and political opponents to the Fascist regime to Switzerland, including the second President of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi. Francesco Biamonti, who lived at the French-Italian border and was a prolific novelist in the 1980s and 1990s, insists on the professionalism of smugglers who have been traditionally present in the Western Alps. In particular, Biamonti stresses that good passeurs are those who never put the life of their clients (migrants) at risk. Novels such as Vento largo (1991) and Le parole la notte (1994) not only point at the negative effects of globalization in Liguria (Italy), but also lament Europeansâ lack of attention to and understanding of increasing migratory flows, well before the media started talking about a migrant âcrisis.â Lastly, I present the work of journalists who occasionally performed the role of âhumanitarian smugglersâ and later reported their experience in written or cinematic form: Io sto con la sposa, by Gabriele del Grande, Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry, and Antonio Augugliaro (2014); Passeur, by RaphaĂ«l Krafft (2017). These works express the authorsâ need to reconnect with the professional and anti-Fascist tradition of passeurs in the Western Alps, at a time when there is no alternative to âillegalâ border crossing for too many migrants.Â
Dynamics of the heat semigroup in Jacobi analysis
Let be the Jacobi Laplacian. We study the chaotic and hypercyclic
behaviour of the strongly continuous semigroups of operators generated by
perturbations of with a multiple of the identity on spaces
A Bayesian numerical homogenization method for elliptic multiscale inverse problems
A new strategy based on numerical homogenization and Bayesian techniques for
solving multiscale inverse problems is introduced. We consider a class of
elliptic problems which vary at a microscopic scale, and we aim at recovering
the highly oscillatory tensor from measurements of the fine scale solution at
the boundary, using a coarse model based on numerical homogenization and model
order reduction. We provide a rigorous Bayesian formulation of the problem,
taking into account different possibilities for the choice of the prior
measure. We prove well-posedness of the effective posterior measure and, by
means of G-convergence, we establish a link between the effective posterior and
the fine scale model. Several numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency
of the proposed scheme and confirm the theoretical findings
Paley--Wiener Theorems for the U(n)--spherical transform on the Heisenberg group
We prove several Paley--Wiener-type theorems related to the spherical
transform on the Gelfand pair , where is
the -dimensional Heisenberg group.
Adopting the standard realization of the Gelfand spectrum as the Heisenberg
fan in , we prove that spherical transforms of --invariant functions and distributions with compact support in
admit unique entire extensions to , and we find real-variable
characterizations of such transforms. Next, we characterize the inverse
spherical transforms of compactly supported functions and distributions on the
fan, giving analogous characterizations
A weighted anisotropic Sobolev type inequality and its applications to Hardy inequalities
In this paper we focus our attention on an embedding result for a weighted
Sobolev space that involves as weight the distance function from the boundary
taken with respect to a general smooth gauge function . Starting from this
type of inequalities we prove some refined Hardy-type inequalities
Optimal Szeg\"o-Weinberger type inequalities
Denote with the first nontrivial
eigenvalue of the Neumann problem \begin{equation*} \left\{\begin{array}{lll}
-\text{div}\left(e^{h\left(|x|\right)}\nabla u\right) =\mu
e^{h\left(|x|\right)}u & \text{in} & \Omega & & \frac{\partial u}{\partial
\nu}=0 & \text{on} & \partial \Omega , \end{array} \right. \end{equation*}
where is a bounded and Lipschitz domain in . Under
suitable assumption on we prove that the ball centered at the origin is the
unique set maximizing among all
Lipschitz bounded domains of of prescribed
-measure and symmetric about the origin. Moreover, an
example in the model case shows that, in general,
the assumption on the symmetry of the domain cannot be dropped. In the
one-dimensional case, i.e. when reduces to an interval we
consider a wide class of weights (including both Gaussian and anti-Gaussian).
We then describe the behavior of the eigenvalue as the interval slides
along the -axis keeping fixed its weighted length
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