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SISP Conference 2023

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Section 5 - Participation and Social Movements

Managers: Manuela Caiani, Giuliana Sorci

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Panel 5.1 Interest groups, lobbying, and influence

Chairs: Alberto Bitonti

Panel 5.2 Workers Struggles and Participation in the Post-Pandemic Era: Addressing Globalization, Environmental Transition, and Collective Layoffs (I)

Chairs: Massimiliano Andretta

Discussants: Paola Imperatore

From cars to solar panels: How ex-GKN metalworkers became climate activists
Daniela Chironi, Eugene Nulman
Abstract

The relationships between environmental movements and workers’ movements have been typically described as tense and conflictual. Both common sense and the scientific literature have tended to consider environmental concerns and workers’ concerns as opposed to each other, mostly highlighting a tension between defence of environment and defence of labour. Is this the actual situation nowadays? Our assumption is that the rise of a strong movement for climate justice has had an influence on the broader movement environment, fertilising workers’ struggles with a new ecologic sensitivity and awareness. In the context of the climate emergency, we contend that rather than the re-proposition of an old, crystallised conflict, new forms of interactions between recently emerged climate movements, such as the Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and Last Generation, and labour movements are also taking place, both at the national and international levels. This might have two major consequences: first, the beginning of the re-composition of the traditional “environment vs. labour” social cleavage, and second, a new role of workers in the formulation of public policies for an actual just transition, which is not only imposed from above, but also thought about and articulated from below. In this paper, we analyse the conditions under which climate activists and workers build coalitions, and the consequences these have for both the climate and labour movements involved in the processes of interaction. We do so by focusing on the paradigmatic case of the ex-GKN occupied factory in Campi Bisenzio, near Florence, which used to produce drive shafts for cars. The company shut down the plant in July 2021, aiming to delocalise production, and fired around 500 workers who in turn have reacted by occupying their factory. Adopting an intersectional perspective, these metalworkers have joined forces with other mobilised subjects – women and ecologists in particular – developing an ambitious plan for becoming the first “socially integrated factory” in Italy, which will be socially owned and will produce eco-compatible solar panels, entirely produced and assembled in Europe and without the use of critical raw materials. Theoretically, we bridge social movement literature and labour sociology; empirically, we rely on semi-structured qualitative interviews and secondary sources.

Labor mobilization amidst crisis: a comparative analysis of worker collective actions in Italy during the covid-19 pandemic and during the 2008 recession
Katia Pilati
Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic has had significant social and economic repercussions, profoundly impacting on labor conditions and workers’ rights. Understanding the labor mobilization that emerged during this crisis is crucial for comprehending how workers politically responded to the challenges they faced during this period. By comparing the most recent protests with those of the previous decade following the 2008 crisis, this paper seeks to uncover shifts, trends, and underlying factors shaping worker collective actions in the context of the covid-19 pandemic. Has there been a decrease in the frequency of protests due to the covid-19 pandemic and the related restrictions? Or have protests adapted to the changing context? While the 2008 recession witnessed a surge in labor contention, studies on worker protests during the covid-19 pandemic are rare. Multiple hypotheses can be put forward to examine them. On one hand, we can posit that lockdown measures, restrictions on public gatherings, and limited mobility may have directly suppressed protests. Furthermore, the difficulties in organizing collective action due to reduced physical interactions could have impeded activists’ ability to mobilize resources to sustain protests effectively. On the other hand, lockdown measures for certain workers have led to economic disruptions and financial strain, thus fueling socioeconomic grievances that may have resulted in a rise of certain types of protests, such as those focusing on economic inequalities, labor rights, and demands for reopening. Additionally, protests might have evolved in form, adapting to the new circumstances. Online platforms and social media channels may have emerged as critical spaces for organizing and expressing dissent. We try to explore these hypotheses by focusing our empirical study on work-related collective actions that occurred in Italy in 2020 and 2021 during the 19-covid pandemic, and compare them with collective actions occurred during the pre-pandemic period, namely between 2008 and 2018 in Italy (N=9,910). The data has been collected through protest event analysis (PEA) using both the national and the 10 local editions La Repubblica. Initial results indicate that during the pandemic period, both similarities and differences emerged when compared to the pre-pandemic period in terms of the repertoire of actions, the types of workers involved, the targets of the actions, and the issues raised. Demonstrations continued to be a prevalent form of action employed by workers, despite the challenges posed by lockdown measures. At the same time, however, significant changes were observed, including a decrease in the frequency of strikes and a rise in the adoption of certain (new) forms of action, such as flash mobs, key delivery protests, and online actions. Furthermore, in contrast to the pre-pandemic period of 2008-2018, where the majority of actions were supported by unions, both union federations and grassroots unions, a significant increase in the number of protests in 2020-2021 occurred without any union backing. This suggests the emergence of more spontaneous forms of protests during the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared to the pre-pandemic period, there is also an increase in the relevance of political issues, many related to lockdown measures, and the observed peaks of protests in May 2020 as well as in October 2020 appear to be linked to political decisions rather than to economic strain. Aligning with the political process model, labor mobilizations during the covid-19 pandemic appear as a response to the evolving dimensions of the political context. This highlights the importance of moving beyond economic models that suggest that worker protests are sensitive to economic conditions and emphasize the nuanced relationship between political factors and labor activism.

Noi precari unlike the others: framing Italian teachers’ precarity in local movements (2022-2023)
Guillaume Silhol
Abstract

This proposal is based on an ongoing ethnographic study of political participation and sociability among precarious schoolteachers in Emilia Romagna in 2022-2023, using empirical data from 20 in-depth interviews with teachers, observations of collective actions related to two grassroots unions (COBAS Scuola and USB Pubblico Impiego – Scuola), and content analysis of 10 documents and videos. It is anchored in a perspective of political sociology, situating framing operations as discursive and symbolic practices in their contexts (Crettiez 2013), in relation to other significant constraints, individual-collective characteristics and situational properties of movements, rather than as the main factors of mobilisation. While the institutionalisation of differentiated statuses and internal inequalities since the unification of middle schools and the formal democratising policies in education has been well documented in sociology of education and in social history since the 1960s (Barbagli and Dei 1969; Gremigni 2012; Recchi 2021; Santoni Rugiu and Santamaita 2011), the issues of voicing precarious teachers’ concerns has been tackled mainly focusing on past movements (Colangelo 2021), on online communication (Gremigni 2012; 2018) and less in conjunction with parallel studies about precarious workers movements (Busso and Rivetti 2014; Giugni and Lorenzini 2016; Neveu 2018). The situation of representing precarious teachers as political subjects deals with issues of collective uncertainty about the implementation of teachers recruitment policies (Malandrino 2021), inequalities of opportunities between disciplines and geographical areas, and contradictory announcements on professional requirements following the COVID years. In this context, the framing operations of teachers’ precariousness, its problematisation in public culture, its causal and its political responsibilities (Gusfield 1981) present significant characteristics. Firstly, activist framing operations about precarious teachers’ predicaments tend to unify significantly different statuses and conditions of temporary contracts, provincial and schools’ rankings of substitute positions, in various terms of moral injustice, structural-historical precariat or dehumanised conditions imputed to “the algorithm” of the Ministry of Instruction. Contrary to Anglophone discussions in political theory about distinctions between precarity and precariousness (Butler 2016), verbal overlaps between precarietà, precariato or precari in Italian language suggests analysig how subjectivation as a precarious teacher plays diversly, not always in strategic perspectives, with actions that stress professionalism and unequal positions inside the State (Neveu 2015, 77–83). These operations sometimes uncover tensions about the inclusion of administrative personnel, recent and atypical figures such as private schools personnel, cooperative-employed teachers, Special Needs (sostegno) teachers or Catholic Religious Education teachers (Silhol 2017) in collective claims. Secondly, the framing of the appropriateness of actions and requests to solve “precariousness” among teachers and education professionals varies significantly in these collectives according to how main unions are depicted, which political or associative allies are considered, and which targets are prioritised in external and internal discourse. The observed practices of individual counselling towards precarious teachers in meetings are balanced with the elaboration of distinctive prognoses and motives for these groups and unions that are in competition between each other, with other grassroots unions and with the three established education federations of CGIL, UIL and CISL. While in one of the two cases (COBAS), targeting local administrations with sit-ins and specific administrative procedural requests represents a coherent objective to mobilise precarious teachers in actions, in the other case (USB), participating in national strikes and actions with political allies such as the political post-communist party Potere al Popolo and alternative left-wing student movements is preferred as a mode of action. In the latter case, this consists in frame bridging (Snow et al. 1986) about statutory instability in schools with criticism of neoliberalism, European policies, and military spending in a distinctive antiliberal left pattern, critical of currents. The former rather favours technical requests and references to previous recruitment policies, negative consequences, and administrative contradictions, limiting statements of political identity. Finally, these noticeable differences in concurrent framings of the predicament suggest paying attention to how the post-pandemic context itself has been diversely perceived and played upon in collective and individual discourse, rather than conceiving it as a merely external constraint on professional activities and on the workforce (sanitary rules, additional personnel, temporary exclusions, distance education…).

On The Margin of Digital Capitalism
Stefano Tortorici
Abstract

On the Margin of Digital Capitalism Worldwide, capitalist digital platforms are increasingly dominating the economy. The latest survey reports the value of the top hundred platforms worldwide to 15.5 trillion dollars (The Platform Economy, 2021). The last twenty years have seen the emergence of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017). Digital platforms and their extractive logic pervade every aspect of society and life (Van Dijck et al., 2018; Huws, 2014). However, this capitalist degeneration of platforms is only one of the possible outcomes, as also testified by the optimist classification of the early 2000s about the digital economy and the spread of labels such as sharing economy and collaborative economy (Sundararajan, 2016). From the beginning of the Internet Revolution, alternative experiences and social movements within the digital economy have spread. In the early 2000s, digital commons emerged (Benkler, 2007). However, most of these alternative experiences quickly failed, with a few exceptions such as Wikipedia (Benkler, 2020) and a few others. Currently, a young and digital cooperative movement is trying to emerge in reaction to the triumphant platform capitalism of the last twenty years. The working paper I present is titled «On the Margin of Digital Capitalism». It constitutes a first attempt to map alternative digital economic experiences that are informed by alternative and anti-capitalistic logic. The classification will primarily consider promising platform cooperatives with more than ten employees, but also the resilient digital commons and other digital realities at the margin of the digital economy. Among the variables considered in the taxonomy, there will be a brief description of these experiences, their legal form, the number of workers employed and the co-owners of these platforms, the number of users and producers that use them, the amount of capital involved, their financial relationship (i.e. where their original capital come from), their relationship with blockchain, their governance, the community and the expertise behind them. A map of all platform cooperatives in the world already exists, but this classification does not consider other non-cooperative experiences, it does not take into account all the variables listed early and it is not updated. To my knowledge, such a complete classification of digital economics alternatives has never been attempted. The map will be a valuable tool in social movement studies and in digital and economic sociology to select case studies and it will be an opportunity to discuss the counter-movements (Polanyi, 1944; Zygmuntowky, 2018) within the digital realm. Bibliography Benkler, Yochai (2020), From Utopia to Practice and Back, in Joseph Reagl and Jackie Koerner (ed. by), Wikipedia@20. Stories of an Incomplete Revolution, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Id (2007), The Wealth of Networks, Yale University Press, New Haven and London. Huws, Ursula (2014), Labor in the Global Digital Economy. The Cybertariat Comes of Ages, Monthly Review Press, New York. Polanyi, Karl (1944), The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, Boston. Srnicek, Nick (2017), Platform Capitalism, Polity Press, London. Sundararajan, Arun (2016), The Sharing Economy. The End of Employment and the rise of crowd-based Capitalism, The MIT Press, Ma Cambridge. The Platform Economy (2021), Value of the top-100 platform rises to $15.5 trillion, available at https://www.platformeconomy.io/blog/value-of-the-top-100-platform-rises-to- 15-5-trillion. Van Dijck, José, Thomas Poell and Martijn De Vaal (2018), The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Zygmuntowsky, Jan J. (2018), Commoning in the Digital Era. Platform Cooperativism as a Counter to Cognitive Capitalism.

Panel 5.2 Workers Struggles and Participation in the Post-Pandemic Era: Addressing Globalization, Environmental Transition, and Collective Layoffs (II)

Chairs: Paola Imperatore

Discussants: Massimiliano Andretta

Labour conflict in Italy: an overview on the transformations and patterns of labour activism of the last 30 years
Paola Imperatore, Massimiliano Andretta
Abstract

Precarity and political participation: Mobilization or withdrawal?
Elisabetta Girardi
Abstract

Striking a Balance: Investigating Press Reporting of Strike Action 2022-2023 and Identifying Opportunities for Unions
Shelly Asquith
Abstract

The "flawed institutionalization" of labour unrest in China
Dario Di Conzo
Abstract

Has China’s Party-State succeeded in institutionalising labour unrest? In the XXI century, Chinese workers have been one of the most active social actors worldwide in contentious actions performed and in material and legislative improvements achieved. Moreover, such results have been accomplished in the industrial relations context marked by a widespread lack of labor laws enforcement by the employers, absence of the right to strike and without a politically independent and truly representative trade union (ACFTU). However, within the ‘world’s factory’ paradigm, Chinese workers, specifically blue-collars in coastal provinces, built up their structural power (Wright, 2000) which resulted in several strikes’ waves between 2008 and 2016 thereby promoting insurgency-led collective bargaining on wages, welfare provision, and working conditions. From 2017 onwards, workers’ strikes have waned, and unrest in manufacturing collapsed whereas infrastructure and services gained centrality but overall, the industrial strife has been increasingly channelled within the legal dispute resolution system. Such an outcome can be interpreted as the ability of the party-state to tame workers’ insurgency by performing three main functions. Firstly, the macro-economic turn, from the export-oriented model of growth towards growth based on infrastructure and consumption, may represent the interplay of “technological and organizational fix” (Silver, 2003) able to undermine workplace bargaining power acquired in the export-oriented manufacturing activities concentrated in coastal provinces. Secondly, the Party-State under the Xi Jinping administration, claiming its monopoly on the political and representative spheres, has promoted growing repression against any seeds of organized collective or associational power wielded by workers, as clearly exemplified by the ineffectiveness of the All-China Federation Trade Union reform initiative and the NGOs' massive crackdown, both occurred in 2015 (Franceschini and Nesossi, 2018). Finally, the existential imperative to uphold the fragile balance between economic growth and social stability imposed on the party-state to perform a harmonizing role in brokering labor-capital relations. Accordingly, Chinese industrial relations seem to move towards a ‘flawed’ institutionalisation, in which collective bargaining is essentially dead (Friedman, 2017) due to the long-standing issue ‘double identity’ (Chen, 2003) suffered by the ACFTU and labor courts are increasingly replacing strikes as a struggle tool, while the party-state is increasingly tightened in brokering capital-labor relations in order to preserve the delicate balance between economic growth and social stability.

Panel 5.3 Investigating ecology as a field of contention: theories, practices, temporalities, and intersections (I)

Chairs: Federica Frazzetta, Paola Imperatore, Lorenzo Zamponi

Discussants: Lorenzo Zamponi

From theory to practice: (de)constructing strategies to tackle environmental concerns
Sonia Arduini, Ludovica Bargellini, Giorgia Pane, Anna Tagliabue
Abstract

The premise from which we started was the inefficacy of current methods of tackling the environmental crisis. We were acutely conscious of the failures of capitalism and extractivism, which have continuously shown us a pattern of inevitability of catastrophic events. We studied cases of indigenous environmental resistance in South America (i.e., the “Waorani case” in Ecuador, 2019; the case of “Unión Hidalgo v. EDF” and others). We realized that the problem did not lie only in the extractivist economy, but that it could be linked also to renewable energy projects. Therefore, we understood that we needed to change our legal paradigms. Indigenous cosmovision provided us with a unique view of the world, offering a different version of the relationship between people and nature, one which is not based on “property” or “use” of the land, but on the concept of “belonging” to the land; one in which man is not at the center of the discussion, nature is (“ecocentrism”). Starting from this conceptual framework, we aimed to develop a methodological approach that would serve to deconstruct anthropocentric categories and to explore the possibilities of decolonising such perspectives. We took into account our positionality as young researchers in a Eurocentric legal cultural context and tried to broaden views and avoid reductive narratives. This reflection resulted in the formulation of a game-based workshop that would reproduce an environmentally critical situation and involve the participants in the elaboration of collective solutions. We divided the attendees into four groups and assigned them “character cards” and “context cards”: we intentionally described stereotypical characters and situations, leaving it to the participants to acknowledge such limits and play with and within them. We were interested in understanding the process that each group would follow to (1) observe, (2) analyze, (3) organize, (4) find collective strategies, (5) involve institutions/other actors. Starting from Freirean Participatory Approach (Freire, 1970), we developed a game-based research that seemed the most effective methodology in order to create collective moments of both active participation and stimulate reflections on “otherwise” approaches to tackle environmental concerns. Participants ought to identify with the assigned character and pursue their objectives while interacting with other groups. This approach is based on the idea that resources for change exist and must be sought and evoked in people themselves (Dolci, 1988). Moreover, it can function as a way to “democratize knowledge production” (Schensul, 2010). Within this context, we are interested in sharing the preliminary results of our workshop by creating a space for collective reflection. The idea is to question how the game-based research could enable the researchers to explore the topic, challenging our positionalities and (re)imagining collective strategies to address socio-environmental issues in a decolonial approach. We would therefore like to discuss the methodology, its limits and problems, to investigate its effectiveness and possible replicability. Moreover, our proposal aims at questioning the anthropocentric perspective and investigating possible 'contaminations' between different paradigms without reproducing dynamics of cultural appropriation or creating distortions and misappropriations.

Ethno-territorial politics in times of eco-climate crisis
Niccolò Bertuzzi
Abstract

The big challenge represented by the ecological crisis and in particular climate change (a central issue in the European and global agenda) is not always considered as so urgent at the local/territorial level. At the same time, the effects of global phenomena are experienced locally, and climate change has different impacts in different places. To face the eco-climatic crisis, international governance has adopted solutions based on the idea of decoupling environmental bads from economic goods. The dominant paradigm does not question – among other aspects – the globalization of existing models of production and trends of mass consumption. Such solutions, cherished by "cosmopolitan" (globalist?) stakeholders and part of the progressive political world, have encountered stern opposition among various social movements and civil society organizations around the world. These have proposed alternative solutions such as degrowth, environmental justice, alter-globalization, ecosocialism, to mention a few. On the other hand, distrust towards both national institutions and supranational/transnational governance (and their market and techno-scientific solutions) is constantly growing, also due to their unsatisfactory achievements in terms of eco-climatic crisis. Based on these premises, the paper focuses on some European regions historically characterized by a robust ethno-territorial (and even separatist) tradition, namely Catalunya, Corsica and Sardinia. The case selection is based on the following reasons: 1) these are sub-state/regional areas historically characterized by ethno-territorial claims; 2) these territories are particularly exposed to climate events: in particular, the selected regions are islands or they border with the sea; 3) in these territories there is as strong presence of relevant territorial movements (in recent years focused especially against the construction of big infrastructures and engaged in climate politics). During the 20th century the nation-state has become “the default unit of analysis of social and political change, of the advance of liberalism and democracy and of modernity itself” (Keating 2008). Furthermore, the assimilation between nation and State has been critically defined as the dominant ideology of modern age (Malešević 2019), and some scholars identify an inevitable relation between State-building and modernity as a whole (Greenfeld 2001). However, ethno-territorial politics is a phenomenon in transformation able to adapt to a new globalized and transnational context (Keating 2001). Adopting ethno-territoriality as an initial framework, I consider the variegated spectrum of positions that - even with different perspectives - put the local identity and the defense of the territory at the centre of their political and social action. The set of collective actors that propose ethno-territorial claims is wide and variegated, going from civic to ethnic nationalism (Hamilton 2002) or more generally from the extreme right to the extreme left of the political spectrum (De Cleen 2017), but also involving grass-roots mobilizations and CSOs (Ruzza 2004; Kousis et al. 2008). Such a focus on ethno-territorial political actors – social movements, parties, civil society organizations – and on how they frame the eco-climatic crisis, allows to study the complex global-local dynamics when it comes to the overlapping contemporary crises. A few authors have theorized the possibility of emerging forms of "green nationalism" (Hamilton 2002; Conversi and Friis Hau 2021), precisely by focusing on those European regions with a strong pro-independence tradition, often identified as "nations without a state". Yet, not all ethno-territorial socio/political actors adopt political ecology frames or even simple eco-friendly positions: in several cases, ethno-territoriality overlaps with populism or denialism, particularly when the ethnic dimension prevails over the civic aspects of nationalism. Particular attention is paid to some current controversies and conflicts in the three regions under investigation, in which ecological claims are intertwined with (ethno)territorial ones, sometimes apparently replicating past/historical trends and discourses, while in other cases they adopt new and original narratives, symbols, and forms of action. Empirically, the work will be based on three types of sources, beside the literature review: ⁃ desk and archival research, ⁃ interviews with experts and central actors in the local political processes, ⁃ fieldwork I will here present some very preliminary reflection based on literature review and desk/archival research, and I especially aim to collect critics and suggestions useful to develop the core of the empirical research, based on interviews and fieldwork. References Conversi, D., & Friis Hau, M. (2021). Green nationalism. Climate action and environmentalism in left nationalist parties. Environmental Politics, 30(7), 1089-1110. De Cleen, B. (2017). ‘Populism and nationalism’. In C. Kaltwasser, P.Taggart, P. Ostiguy, & P. Ochoa Espejo (Eds.), Handbook of populism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 342-362. Greenfeld, L. (2001). The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Hamilton, P. (2002). The greening of nationalism: Nationalising nature in Europe. Environmental Politics, 11(2), 27-48. Keating, M. (2001). Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a Post-Sovereignty Era. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Keating, M. (2008). Thirty Years of Territorial Politics. West European Politics, 31(1-2): 60-81. . Kousis, M., Porta, D. D., & Jiménez, M. (2008). Southern European environmental movements in comparative perspective. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(11), 1627-1647. Malešević, S., (2019). Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruzza, C. (2004). Europe and Civil Society: Movement Coalitions and European Governance. Manchester: MUP

The emotional dimension of the global climate justice movement: a North-South comparison between Italy and Mexico
Vito Giannini, Alice Poma
Abstract

Panel 5.3 Investigating ecology as a field of contention: theories, practices, temporalities, and intersections (II)

Chairs: Federica Frazzetta, Paola Imperatore, Lorenzo Zamponi

Discussants: Federica Frazzetta

Learning on the move: politicisation and efficacy in climate strikes
Lorenzo Zamponi, Martin Portos
Abstract

The new wave of cycling activism in Milan
Matteo Spini, Jacopo Targa
Abstract

As most Italian cities, Milan is deeply car-centric. Cars monopolize streets and other surfaces, excluding their use for public sociability (such as children’s games), walking and cycling and endangering humans and non-humans. Moreover, the high concentration of cars contributes to urban heat, noise, road accidents, climate change, and the devastating health impact of air pollution. According to Khomenko et al. (2021), air pollution leads to more than 50,000 preventable deaths every year in Europe, for the European Environment Agency (2021) more than 350,000. In the North of Italy, air quality is especially dramatic, with Milan being the 5th European for NO2 mortality burden (1,864 deaths for 2021) (Khomenko et al., 2021). This “imperial automobility” (Brand & Wissen, 2021) is largely caused by direct policy support to the car sector, huge investments in road infrastructures and poor investment in public transports and bike mobility. Between 2020 and 2030, the Italian governments have budgeted 98.6 billion euros in favour of the car sector versus 1.2 for bicycles (Magliulo & Telluri, 2022). The consequences of the latter are the absence of cycling facilities and the bad quality of existing ones, which discourage the daily use of bicycles. In 2020, Milan received an E in the rating of cycling infrastructures (from A to G), same as Rome and Turin but better than Naples and Palermo (both G) (Magliulo & Telluri, 2022). Nevertheless, cultural reasons are another support factor to this “imperial automobility”. As in the Netherlands cycling and national and cultural identity are tied (Kuipers, 2013), a similar observation can be proposed to inquire the attitudes Italian people have towards the automobile. Owning and driving a car is a manifestation of adulthood, masculinity and status symbol, and it is naturalised as a mode of transportation. To provide some numbers, 49% of the time spent in displacement in Milan is by heavy mobility (fossil fuel cars and motorbikes), 27% by light mobility (foot, bike, ebike, scooter) and 24% by sustainable mobility (public transport, shared motorbike or car, private electric car) (Legambiente & Ipsos, 2022). This has dramating implications beyond the environmental harm, but also influences a downplay of the danger that car mobility implies and a stigmatization of cycling behavior (Marshall et al., 2017). This contribution explores - through the use of qualitative methods like participant ethnography and analysis of social media posts and documents - the rise of the new wave of Milan's cycling activism. This is performed as a practice of resistance against the imperial automobility, claiming a bike-centric city and, more in general, the right to the city. Milan’s cycling activism is contributing to politicizing the mobility and life-style of urban dwellers, not only with the critical mass or conventional forms of struggles (rallies, lobbying), but also with new creatives tactics of protest such as bike-strikes, ghost cycle lanes, human-bike chains, silent bike ride, and road bloackades. What emerges is that on the one hand, these struggles aim at changing daily habits of citizens, and, on the other hand, they are also directed towards the influence of the political agenda, aiming at drastically improving the bike friendliness of the city and challenging the naturalised cultural attitude towards the car. This contribution analyses as well the political opportunity structure of the city, casting a light on the different signals sent by the City Council and the City Committee to bike activists. This is worthy of attention because it could be witnessed a difference in the attitude between the two bodies, with the first showing openness to the claims of the activists, while the second adopts a more cautious attitude. To sum up, this research aims at giving a panoramic and stimulating a discussion regarding the rise of these new practices and their impact on urban politics. Bibliography Brand, U., & Wissen, M. (2021). The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism. Verso Books. European Environment Agency. (2021). Health impacts of air pollution in Europe, 2021. https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/health-risks-of-air-pollution/health-impacts-of-air-pollution. Khomenko, S., Cirach, M., Pereira-Barboza, E., Mueller, N., Barrera-Gómez, J., Rojas-Rueda, D., de Hoogh, K., Hoek, G., & Nieuwenhuijsen, M. (2021). Premature mortality due to air pollution in European cities: a health impact assessment. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(3), e121–e134. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(20)30272-2 Kuipers, G. (2013). The rise and decline of national habitus: Dutch cycling culture and the shaping of national similarity. European Journal of Social Theory, 16(1), 17–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431012437482 Legambiente & Ipsos (2022). Monitoraggio cambiamenti, atteggiamenti, abitudini di mobilità degli italiani. https://www.legambiente.it/comunicati-stampa/osservatorio-stili-mobilita-2022-ii-edizione/ Magliulo, C., & Talluri, M. (2022). Clean cities. Non è un paese per bici. Come rendere ciclabili le città italiane: piani, scenari, risorse. https://italy.cleancitiescampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Clean_Cities_Non_Un_Paese_Bici_06Nov2022.pdf Marshall, W. E., Piatkowski, D., & Johnson, A. (2017). Scofflaw bicycling: Illegal but rational. Journal of Transport and Land Use, 10(1), 805–836.

Narratives of extreme weather events as a field of conflict: the Emilia Romagna case study
Federica Frazzetta, Paola Imperatore
Abstract

Panel 5.4 THE RADICALIZATION OF EXTREMIST MOVEMENTS WITHIN THE PROTEST DURING THE PANDEMIC STATE OF EMERGENCY.

Chairs: Petrocchi Petrocchi

Panel 5.5 Contentious science? Democracy, epistemologies and social movements facing the politicization of science (I)

Chairs: Maria Francesca Murru

Discussants: Luca Raffini

Trusting Science Again? A critical reflection on the delegitimation of scientific and expert knowledge
Michele Marzulli, Fabio Lucchini
Abstract

The major economic and political crises and those caused by natural events - whether linked to human action - seem to call into question certain principles of collective action. In particular, the processes of planetary interdependence, the global value chain, and climate change are affecting certain cornerstones of Western affluent societies. It is an evolution of what was foreseen at the end of the Cold War, namely the emergence of a global ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992). In particular, the capacity of western democracies to respond with their traditional instruments to ever-increasing needs (crisis of welfare systems), to a demand that has changed profoundly over time (demographic crisis) and to an economic system that does not seem to accept even elementary limitations (Stiglitz, 2015) are questioned. In such a context, alongside a crisis of confidence in traditional systems of political representation, a foundation of Western culture - trust in scientific and expert knowledge - appears undermined (Alteri et al., 2021; Safford et al., 2021). If, during the glorious period of the ‘American Century’, some scholars showed how a direct link between liberal-democratic regimes and scientific progress could be assumed (Kalleberg, 2010), the emergence of a critical cycle at the beginning of the 21st century provoked a radical change. In particular, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08, the return of armed conflict in Europe and the pandemic crisis have contributed to weakening public confidence in scientific knowledge and expert knowledge. We are therefore living in a historical moment characterised by the questioning of science and all the expert knowledge typical of the postmodern reflexive society (Giddens, 1994; Luhmann, 2017). Beyond the growing spread of conspiracy theories and fake news, indeed there is no shortage of critical issues related to the independence of research (in particular, medical research) from private funding sources that are likely to create conditioning and generate conflicts of interest. In a context of growing disillusionment with the capacity of democratic institutions to represent and protect collective interests, it is increasingly complex to discern - within a myriad of easily accessible sources - those that are authoritative from those without empirical basis. In this paper, by following the activity of a scientific populariser on internet and social platforms (MedBunker) and the interactions generated by his followers, an attempt will be made to show the problematic nodes of knowledge communication, critically reflecting on repertoires of strategies to overcome skepticism and mistrust (from the ‘principle of authority’ to the presumed neutrality of quantitative data). Finally, a discussion will be proposed on the crucial role that basic scientific research - free of external conditioning and therefore independent - should play in bridging the growing public’s trust gap with scientific and expert knowledge. Alteri, L., Parks, L., Raffini, L., & Vitale, T. (2021). Covid-19 and the structural crisis of liberal democracies. Partecipazione e conflitto - PArticipation and COnflict, 14(1), 510. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (Vol. 17). Sage. Kalleberg, R. (2010). 9 The Ethos of Science and the Ethos of Democracy. In Robert K. Merton (pp. 182-213). Columbia University Press. Luhmann, N. (2017). Trust and Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Safford, T.G., Whitmore, E.H., & Hamilton, L.C. Follow the scientists? How beliefs about the practice of science shaped COVID-19 views. Journal of Science Communication, 2021, 20 (7): 1-19. Stiglitz, J.E. (2015), The origins of inequality, and policies to contain it, National Tax Journal, 68:2, 425-448.

Eroi e no vax. Verso una sanità punitiva
Gabriella Petti
Abstract

Il mio intervento ha come oggetto la rappresentazione pubblica degli operatori sanitari italiani che ha accompagnato l’introduzione dell’obbligo vaccinale con pesanti limitazioni nell’esercizio della professione. Di fronte alla diffusione della pandemia i media hanno prima presentato gli operatori sanitari come eroi nazionali: gli "angeli di Covid" impegnati in una dura lotta contro il dolore e la morte e determinati a mettere il loro dovere al di sopra della vita personale, della famiglia e dell'amore. L'apertura della campagna di vaccinazione cambia drammaticamente la loro posizione nel discorso pubblico, trasformando medici e infermieri da eroi a potenziali e pericolosi fuorilegge. Questa è solo una delle tante storie che hanno delineato i confini morali della nostra esperienza pandemica. Tuttavia, il caso degli operatori sanitari è ancora più rilevante di altri poiché questi ultimi hanno fornito servizi essenziali per limitare l'impatto della Covid-19 sulle nostre società. La scelta di rifiutare la vaccinazione da parte di alcuni di loro ha portato alla diffusione di un'ansia sociale favorita dai media che hanno focalizzato le loro narrazioni su questo rifiuto come una potenziale minaccia alla sicurezza nazionale - e facendo questo, hanno trascurato decenni di tagli al bilancio che hanno reso il nostro sistema sanitario nazionale incapace di reagire alla pandemia in modo efficiente. È mia intenzione analizzare la trasformazione degli operatori sanitari da angeli della Covid-19 a maligni anti-vaccino, attingendo agli studi classici sul panico morale (Cohen 1971; Hall et al. 1978) e ai contributi più recenti che hanno allargato il campo di analisi a temi come società del rischio, regolazione morale e analisi del discorso (Crictcher 2003). Per prima cosa fornirò un breve sintesi del processo discorsivo che ha generato inquietudine nei confronti dei demoni sanitari agevolando l’introduzione dell’obbligo vaccinale. In seguito, analizzerò il complesso di regole introdotto a partire dall’obbligo vaccinale per gli operatori sanitario ed esteso ad altre categorie, di cui tralascerò i dettagli tecnici trattando piuttosto gli aspetti centrali, utili per comprendere le logiche e le retoriche di fondo. La decisione del governo italiano è di estrema rilevanza. L'Italia è stato il primo paese in Europa a rendere obbligatoria la vaccinazione contro il Covid-19 per gli operatori sanitari: per questo motivo, la legge merita un esame più approfondito e un'attenta valutazione degli effetti sociali che ha prodotto. Infine, introdurrò alcune considerazioni più ampie sul modello sanitario implicito alla base di questa decisione del governo. A mio parere, ci stiamo muovendo verso una cultura sanitaria punitiva che integrerà l'attuale cultura del controllo (Garland 2001) con un focus specifico sui comportamenti di salute non conformi. Il mio approccio metodologico è qualitativo nella sua stessa natura. Traccerò lo sviluppo del panico morale causato dai cosiddetti no vax sanitari attraverso un’analisi discorsiva (Macdonald 2003) del modo in cui i giornali italiani hanno raccontato la loro storia dal novembre 2020 - quando è iniziata la campagna di immunizzazione Covid-19 – alla conversione del decreto in legge nel maggio 2021. La dimensione discorsiva è un aspetto rilevante per descrivere lo sviluppo di un panico morale (Critcher 2003, 172 ss) che porta a imporre definizioni e possibili soluzioni su specifiche minacce. Ho costruito il mio archivio di articoli di giornale attraverso un principio di campionamento ispirato al purposive sampling (Given 2008). La mia scelta della stampa piuttosto che della trasmissione mediatica si basa sulle diverse funzioni che svolgono nella cosiddetta agenda-setting pubblica: i giornali forniscono lo sfondo cognitivo e narrativo che permette l'interpretazione della vita sociale - mentre la televisione offre l'impatto drammatico della vista, del suono e del movimento, facendo appello al potere del sentimento. Per analizzare il dispositivo legale introdotto, invece, mi concentrerò sul DL 44 del 2021 e sulla successiva legge di conversione a partire dalla relazione parlamentare, per poi passare brevemente a quella che ha esteso l’obbligo per altre categorie. Si stratta, infatti, di norme che si pongono in continuum andando a ridefinire, di volta in volta, in termini sempre più restrittivi la disciplina originaria.

Virus letterari
Walter Stefano Baroni
Abstract

Il paper ha come oggetto la letteratura di divulgazione scientifica prodotta dalle cosiddette virostar italiane (da Ilaria Capua a Matteo Bassetti) tra il 2020 e il 2022. L’obiettivo è quello di descrivere, a partire da un evento eccezionale come la pandemia da SARS-CoV-2, le modalità di comunicazione adottate dagli esperti nazionali di scienza: non nel senso di stabilirne l’eventuale efficacia o i margini di miglioramento, ma per esplorarne il sottotesto culturale e “ideologico”. A differenza delle performance televisive, degli articoli di giornale o dei tweet online, questa letteratura offre un campo di analisi più compatto e articolato nel quale misurare i programmi divulgativi – con la loro idea di scienza e di rapporto tra questa e la politica – di questo gruppo di professionisti del contagio. Secondo la logica dell’analisi discorsiva, mi interessa esaminare chi è il soggetto di enunciazione del discorso “popolare” delle virostar, che cosa viene enunciato e a chi è diretta questa enunciazione. In sintesi, la prima questione resta ambigua se non addirittura irrisolta: le virostar utilizzano una modalità pedagogica di discorso – la parola che il maestro che conosce rivolge all’allievo che non sa – incompatibile con il normale funzionamento della democrazia – che presuppone un rapporto di uguaglianza tra le diverse posizioni dei soggetti impegnati nel dibattito democratico (Arendt 1994). La mancata tematizzazione di questo problema all’interno delle opere prese in esame spinge queste ultime a legittimare se stesse trasfigurando l’asimmetria del discorso pedagogico nella distanza che oppone eroismo e mancanza di eroismo – chi scrive è superiore a chi legge non perché sa di più, ma perché ha agito maggiormente e meglio. Il problema della legittimazione della parola pubblica dell’esperto pandemico, dunque, non è risolto affrontando la questione del posizionamento dello scienziato, in quanto cittadino (Gouldner 2015), all’interno del dibattito pubblico, ma fondando il proprio diritto di enunciazione all’interno di un discorso regressivo in cui eroismo medico e sacrificio per la patria si intrecciano in modo indissolubile – e il campione di questa strategia di accreditamento pubblico è l’infettivologo Matteo Bassetti, nel suo Una lezione da non dimenticare (2020). Il contenuto dell’enunciazione delle virostar è costituito dall’elogio della scienza e dei suoi successi – contro la miseria della politica. Mentre lo scienziato è guidato dalla verità e dalla sua oggettività innegabile, il politico si muove nello spazio della doxa sottoposto agli umori delle plebi ignoranti che ne condizionano l’azione. Sfortunatamente, l’immagine dell’attività scientifica che questi testi restituiscono non ha nulla a che fare con la sua pratica reale. La dimensione retorica della scienza che è saldata al suo concreto funzionamento all’interno dei rapporti sociali di ogni giorno è infatti completamente cancellata (Gross 2006). Piuttosto, se ne restituisce una immagine mitologica (Mayer, Rowan 1983) che non contribuisce alla comprensione del funzionamento dell’impresa scientifica, costituendola come una sorta di oggetto trascendente, al di là delle attività ordinarie degli uomini. Infine, lo stile spesso favolistico e iperbolico che caratterizza queste opere definisce con precisione il loro lettore ideale: un fanciullo che non sa nulla e cui bisogna spiegare tutto usando metafore pittoresche. Nell’insieme, l’eulogia della scienza e dello scienziato mostra che dietro il più nuovo si cela il più antico: le virostar riattualizzano l’antico sogno platonico, illustrato nella Repubblica, del governo dei più sapienti – in quanto migliori – e i tratti individuati da Gramsci della lunga durata della storia degli intellettuali italiani, la cui vocazione universalistica li separa dal popolo e dalla sua invincibile volgarità – prima in nome del dio universale, oggi in quello della scienza globalizzata.

A Science of “conspiracism”: analysing the construction of a politically contentious concept.
Sofia Scacco, Stefano Pirisi
Abstract

Since its first appearances in Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1966) and in Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1967), «conspiracy theory» emerged as a demarcation concept, referring to interpretations of history and social facts whose main characteristic is to be located outside the perimeter of warranted and rational knowledge. On these bases, studies on «conspiracy theory» gradually evolved toward the construction of the category of a conspiracist mindset, the scientific study of which has progressively located the phenomenon of «conspiracy theories» in the fringes of society, associating it with psychological pathologies and political extremism. As has previously been argued by a number of scholars, the pathologization of such a complex phenomenon, not only simplifies it but also runs the risk of stripping it of its political value. With regards to these problems, our aim is twofold: at first, we will reconstruct the process through which the reading of the concept «conspiracy theory» itself took shape focusing on the main feature of intentionality. We will explore how, in the history of «conspiracy theory» research, this focal point has contributed to broadening the spectrum of interpretations liable to be defined as «conspiracist». As a consequence, the line separating strong instances of social critique and examples of eccentric «conspiracy theories» is blurred, and both can be associated with the pathologizing notion of «conspiracy mindset». We argue that it is only through a more comprehensive reading - where the intentionality behind a «conspiracist» interpretation of the world does not simply become the symptom of an irrational or even pathological mindset - that the politically contentious characteristics of the phenomenon can be properly understood. Secondly, after having reaffirmed the underlying political instances of critique that animate the phenomenon, we will analyze some of the main characteristics of a European field of expertise on «conspiracism» in connection with the prevention of «radical extremism». In doing so, our aim is to understand how and why a sanitized and depoliticized understanding of «conspiracy theories» - currently deployed to define a wide array of contentious subjectivities and consequently to develop security-oriented policies around such subjectivities - acquired simultaneous scientific and political resonance.

Panel 5.5 Contentious science? Democracy, epistemologies and social movements facing the politicization of science (II)

Chairs: Niccolò Bertuzzi

Discussants: Elisa Lello

Oggetti politici non identificati. La politica anticapitalista e le mobilitazioni nella fase pandemica.
Michele Garau
Abstract

Il contributo vorrebbe mettere alla prova alcune categorie del più recente dibattito teorico sulle rivolte urbane e sulle lotte che emergono nello spazio pubblico e della circolazione di merci con forme differenti dai repertori classici dei movimenti sociali, legati al solco del movimento operaio. Tali categorie vengono messe a confronto con la realtà empirica e la «morfologia» delle mobilitazioni di protesta avvenute negli ultimi anni, a cavallo dell’emergenza pandemica. Lo scritto si concentra sul modo in cui le mobilitazioni collettive contro il «green pass» e le misure emergenziali imposte nel periodo pandemico sono state messe a tema e affrontate dal punto di vista di alcuni gruppi militanti e traiettorie politiche anticapitaliste radicali. Il punto focale dell’analisi è volto a stabilire quali aspetti discorsivi e pratici delle proteste – gesti, parole e soggetti – abbiano assunto maggiore peso e centralità nelle prospettive di intervento politico considerate. Lo sfondo dell’analisi è il tipo di regime argomentativo usato – nel panorama politico anticapitalista – per affacciarsi sui movimenti sociali spuri, sugli “oggetti politici non identificati” che sono emersi con forza almeno nell’ultimo decennio. Tali forme del conflitto politico sono disorientanti per i punti di vista e i linguaggi della sinistra, escono dal suo spettro di identità, soggetti, canali di regolazione del dissenso e programmi. Sono espressione di un conflitto sociale che cade fuori dal frame del movimento operaio e oltre la consunzione dei suoi modi di totalizzazione del conflitto. Mentre però diversi discorsi critici e politici hanno insistito su questo scenario, l’emergere delle proteste contro lo stato d’emergenza pandemico, pur condensando un novero di punti materialmente inscritti nel bagaglio della critica anticapitalista – digitalizzazione dello spazio pubblico, sorveglianza algoritmica, biopolitica repressiva – hanno dato luogo a un generale smarrimento e a posizioni contraddittorie. Si vorrebbero ricostruire i punti dirimenti dei discorsi teorici sui movimenti sociali spuri, nel campo anticapitalista, e confrontarli con lo sguardo dei militanti che hanno scelto di misurarsi con le mobilitazioni nella fase pandemica. Quest’ultima parte viene affrontata grazie a un insieme di fonti: articoli, appelli, volantini, ma principalmente interviste semi-strutturate, su alcuni gruppi politici presenti in Italia (Roma, Valsusa, Trieste, Busto Arsizio). Un primo punto di attacco è la definizione di «circulation struggles» coniata da Joshua Clover. Questo termine indica un nuovo «repertorio dell’azione collettiva» basato sulle tattiche dell’occupazione dello spazio pubblico, delle rivolte e del blocco di infrastrutture sensibili. Il predominio della sfera della circolazione di merci nel funzionamento del modo di produzione capitalistico – secondo questa analisi – fa sì che alla strategia incentrata sullo sciopero, in cui i lavoratori agivano «in quanto lavoratori», subentrino lotte in cui gli individui agiscono a partire da condizioni di proletarizzazione o spossessamento più generiche e frammentate. Questo implica che tali tattiche non possiedano un intrinseco carattere emancipativo e che non siano associabili ad un particolare posizionamento etico e politico, come dimostra la trasversalità del loro utilizzo: un vistoso esempio sarebbero i blocchi stradali del «Freedom Convoy» in Canada, le sollevazioni contro le misure sanitarie durante la pandemia e l’assalto al Campidoglio del 6 gennaio 2021. Le stesse pratiche di blocco e occupazione dello spazio infrastrutturale della circolazione avvengono in Canada e a Standing Rock, nella George Floyd Rebellion e nelle violazioni collettive delle misure di confinamento. C’è anche un punto fenomenico evidente: la perdita di centralità dell’elemento discorsivo e progettuale dell’agire politico, con le sue identità stabili preventivamente formate, nel panorama delle proteste sociali. Si tratta di un aspetto descritto dalle riflessioni teoriche sul concetto di «destituzione», dal «Colectivo Situaciones» al «Comitato invisibile». C’è però una questione fondamentale da sciogliere: se rinunciamo a determinare la politicità dei movimenti sociali a partire da una valutazione rigida della loro composizione sociologica, essi mantengono nel presente un’ambiguità di fondo. Mentre l’assalto del 6 gennaio è un’azione puramente «politica», a sostegno di uno schieramento elettorale, le proteste contro il confinamento o il «green pass» condividono con altre mobilitazioni precedenti, quali i «gilets jaunes» o i «Forconi» in Italia, un’iniziale opacità di intenti e visione. In tutti questi movimenti (o «non movimenti», riprendendo la categoria di Asef Bayat, mutuata dalle riviste «Endnotes» e «Temps critiques») c’è una compresenza di lineamenti ideologici e parole d’ordine contraddittori, che si biforcano tra una politicizzazione in senso reazionario e varianti inedite della politica popolare di emancipazione. Sulla scia di questi interrogativi si vorrebbe proporre una ricognizione sulle formazioni politiche di segno anticapitalista che hanno cercato, in Italia, di sviluppare un intervento politico nelle mobilitazioni contro il green pass e le misure di gestione autoritaria del periodo pandemico. Il cuore di tale ricognizione ruota attorno ad alcuni nodi: repertori d’azione e gesti politici; nuclei ideologici e soggetti coinvolti, temi e parole. Questi percorsi hanno individuato nelle proteste contro il green pass delle linee potenziali di politicizzazione che permettevano una «lotta nelle lotta», l’ambivalenza e la contesa tra nuclei differenti e visioni del mondo. Queste linee di frattura che la pandemia ha fatto emergere riguardano il rapporto con la verità e le narrazioni dominanti, l’esigenza di una presa di parola collettiva e i rapporti comunitari, l’impatto della digitalizzazione degli spazi di vita e i modi di esprimere il dissenso.

The Roles of Publics in New Genomic Techniques development
Andrea Felicetti, Federica Frazzetta
Abstract

LA COLONIALITA’ NELLA LOTTA: TARANTO, LA MORTE E LA MODERNITÀ DELL’AMBIENTALISMO
Alessandro Esposito, Michael Tortorella
Abstract

Nel 1979, Salvatore De Rosa, critico della psicologia istituzionale, militante e studioso delle conseguenze irreversibili dello sviluppo industriale su Taranto, mostrò come quest’ultimo si sarebbe dimostrato incompatibile con un miglioramento sostanziale della “qualità della vita”. Definì questa trasformazione e appropriazione territoriale una “industrializzazione senza sviluppo”, che portava con sé un’idea di abitare in senso socio-ecologico totalmente coloniale. L’analisi posta da Salvatore De Rosa risulta lungimirante, perché, rifiutando la retorica del “boom economico”, fortemente sostenuta da una visione egemonica della classe operaia, ha posto il focus sulla riproduzione sociale dei corpi e sulla progressiva trasformazione del territorio. Il processo d’industrializzazione, di fatto, portava con sé una serie di conseguenze irreversibili che oggi hanno portato a riconoscere comunemente Taranto come “zona di sacrificio”. In questo quadro, la produzione del discorso scientifico in rapporto alla coscientizzazione ecologica deve tener conto della normalizzazione e dell’interiorizzazione dei discorsi istituzionali, prodotti dalle varie governance ambientali, da parte della comunità locale. In questo senso, risulta, quindi, utile provare a porre come centrale la questione del monitoraggio ambientale come “dispositivo” politico e “costrutto” socio-culturale (Alliegro, 2020) nel suo rapporto con la percezione quotidiana della “morte”, subita dalla comunità locale. Per far ciò, legheremo tale dispositivo, fatto proprio dalle lotte dei movimenti ambientalisti a Taranto, da un lato, alla normalizzazione di un determinato modo moderno di concepire le norme e, più in generale, la giustizia e, dall’altro, all’ontologia coloniale della “morte” che ne è presupposto ineludibile. Per prima cosa, espliciteremo quindi i presupposti normativi della colonialità in generale, individuati nel concetto di “giustizia” moderna descritto da Fanon e Gordon. La colonialità diviene nella lotta una condizione ontologicamente costitutiva del mondo moderno attraverso la normalizzazione e depoliticizzazione di norme e diritti in favore di una presunta neutralità dell’agire morale. Fuori da un processo di reale decolonizzazione, gli autori citati ci mostrano come le stesse rivendicazioni di diritti fondati sulla giustizia e sulla libertà siano, in realtà, rivendicazioni tutte immerse già nella colonialità del potere. Tale colonialità determina le norme attraverso le quali “pensiamo” e, in tal modo, in assenza di una reale rottura, costruisce i dispositivi conflittuali che “di tanto in tanto” le soggettività pongono in essere, fino a normalizzare la condizione stessa della “morte”, esperita dalla comunità colonizzata (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Successivamente, individueremo tali presupposti nell’utilizzo che i movimenti ambientalisti a Taranto hanno fatto del dispositivo del “monitoraggio ambientale”. Tale dispositivo, nella nostra lettura, riproduce una specifica conoscenza che, nella pretesa di riconoscimento universale, depoliticizza il conflitto socio-ecologico in nome di una fantomatica neutralità delle “norme”. Il monitoraggio ambientale e il modello scientista che ha incarnato a Taranto si è da sempre posto in continuità con una concezione normalizzata di giustizia intesa come normatività neutra. Un esempio concreto di tale normalizzazione delle norme sulla base del dispositivo di monitoraggio ambientale è l’ordinanza comunale dei Wind Days. Questa ordinanza, fortemente sostenuta dai vari movimenti ambientalisti in quanto necessaria alla riduzione del danno, se riletta in un’ottica decoloniale quale dispositivo di potere, fa emergere la colonialità insita nelle rivendicazioni ambientaliste. In che rapporto stanno la dimensione del potere istituzionale, la conoscenza esperta e la natura sistemica da cui scaturisce il dato normativo secondo il quale si possono chiudere ospedali, scuole, case perché inquinate ma non quelle infrastrutture da cui ne deriva tutto ciò? Lungi dal voler ricadere in uno schema dicotomico oppositivo nel quale si accetta acriticamente, da un lato, il paradigma scientista e, dall’altro, la banalizzazione del rischio di ammalarsi e morire, ciò che si vuole evidenziare è l’uso strumentale del monitoraggio ambientale necessario per la rilevazione dei wind days. Si tratta allora di mostrare il carattere politico e non neutrale del monitoraggio che serve per sostenere una norma - in questo caso quella del wind days - che incorpora una visione depoliticizzante delle cause sistemiche rispetto al deteriorarsi delle relazioni socio-ecologiche costitutive del quartiere. La realtà materiale del suddetto “dispositivo” di disciplinamento, orientato alla normalizzazione della crisi socio-ecologica, sta nell’aver sfruttato il danno socio-ecologico come elemento di segregazione spaziale della comunità medesima, rendendo evidente la trasformazione del suddetto quartiere in zona di sacrificio e la normalizzazione della contaminazione. Il suddetto meccanismo, più che voler tutelare la comunità ed aprire una possibilità di rottura politica con il sistema che ha reso possibile la crisi, sembra un processo alquanto efficace di pacificazione del conflitto socio-ecologico, usando un paradigma scientista che naturalizza la crisi in quanto fatto naturale e normale. Per concludere, di fronte a un orizzonte di colonialità pervasivo degli stessi movimenti di lotta ambientalisti a Taranto, ci interrogheremo sulla possibilità di riappropriarci del dispositivo del “monitoraggio ambientale” e dell'esperienza comunitaria della morte come elementi di decolonizzazione della lotta.

Voicing Earth. Estrattivismo del litio e prospettive energetiche alternative in Portogallo
Luca Onesti, Giada Coleandro, Giorgio Pirina
Abstract

La consapevolezza della crisi ecologica ha portato, per quanto riguarda l'Unione Europea, allo sviluppo di strategie e politiche volte a contrastare i cambiamenti climatici e a promuovere la transizione ecologica. Da quando la digitalizzazione e il settore dei veicoli elettrici (EV) sono stati identificati come due vettori principali del cosiddetto modello di economia "verde", la corsa al litio e ad altre risorse critiche sta rapidamente aumentando e, in parte, reintroducendo processi estrattivi all'interno dei confini europei, dopo una lunga fase dominata dalla esternalizzazione di queste attività nel Sud del mondo. Dopo che alcuni studi hanno riportato che il Portogallo è uno dei Paesi dell'UE con le più grandi riserve di litio, il governo portoghese ha promosso le attività estrattive concedendo nuove licenze di ricerca e prospezione. In risposta a questa strategia, i rappresentanti delle comunità locali si sono mobilitati per denunciare il rischio di deforestazione, di inquinamento dell'acqua e dell'aria e i pericoli per la salute causati dell'uso di sostanze chimiche e dai detriti dell'attività estrattiva. Questo contributo è il risultato parziale di un lavoro condotto insieme ai colleghi Giada Coleandro e Giorgio Pirina ed è basato sull'analisi della letteratura sull'ecologia politica e sulla storia dei movimenti sociali in Portogallo, sulla lettura di report prodotti dal governo portoghese, dall'UE, dalle compagnie minerarie e da esperti del settore. Questo tipo di ricerca è arricchito da una indagine etnografica di tipo esploratorio, basata su interviste condotte tra il 2019 e il 2021 nella zona della Serra de Estrela, situata nella regione portoghese della Beira Interior, oltre che sulla ricerca netnografica sui social network riguardo a gruppi di attivisti e cittadini che si oppongono all'estrattivismo e allo stesso tempo lavorano sull'educazione ambientale ed ecologica. Il focus su questa regione – caratterizzata da una lunga storia di estrazione mineraria e che è stata nel secolo scorso un importante polo dell'industria laniera, ora dismessa –, ci permette di riconsiderare il lavoro di cura delle comunità locali e dei movimenti ambientalisti, i cui rappresentanti possono essere considerati come lavoratori meta-industriali, poiché forniscono valore metabolico, sostenendo sia l'integrità ecologica, cruciale per le attività produttive, sia il metabolismo sociale. A questo proposito, l'estrattivismo dovrebbe essere affrontato alla luce dell'agency ambientale di questi collettivi che, pur mantenendo vivo il mondo, non sono pienamente riconosciuti come forze di riproduzione. Al fine di esplorare l'ambivalenza della transizione ecologica dall'alto verso il basso, questo contributo prenderà dunque in considerazione la catena di approvvigionamento delle attività estrattive in Portogallo, insieme a quelle di riproduzione sociale e naturale espresse dalle comunità locali. L'impatto atteso di questo contributo è quello di delineare l'ambivalenza della transizione ecologica "dando voce" alla Terra (Voicing Earth), ovvero esaminando le possibili alleanze tra lavoratori e movimenti ambientalisti volte a proporre alternative di sviluppo all'estrattivismo predatorio.

Panel 5.6 Social Movements and collective action during current multiple crises (I)

Chairs: Giuliana Sorci

Discussants: Gianni Piazza

On the Margin of Digital Capitalism
Stefano Tortorici
Abstract

Civic Monitoring: Grassroots Democratic Practices in Times of Multiple Crises
Alessandra Lo Piccolo
Abstract

How do social movements and civil society organizations contribute to checking powerholders during multiple crises? Over time, civil society has expanded its repertoire beyond traditional mobilization, protests, and petitions to incorporate diverse everyday practices of control, evaluation, and oversight of institutional actors. Eased by the spread of new digital media and technologies, grassroots actors have increased their power of scrutiny upon ruling elites. However, little has been said about the characteristics and consequences of civic monitoring as a grassroots democratic practice. Civic monitoring is a grassroots democratic practice that exposes power abuses and advocates for transparency and accountability within democratic systems. Stemming from Keane's theory of monitory democracy, a third option between representative and participatory models, this concept is exemplified by the proliferation of non-institutional actors and campaigns for controlling governments and powerholders from below, such as citizens' assemblies, juries, think tanks, and investigative media. Today, civic monitoring practices encompass diverse collective actors such as national and international NGOs, social movement organizations, alternative media outlets, civic platforms, and grassroots entities. However, few authors have investigated internal differentiations among civic monitoring practices and their varying democratic effects. By comparing different instances of civic monitoring in the Spanish context (2012-2022), the study illustrates how this democratic practice has been deployed by a diverse range of civil society organizations, resulting in both counter-democratic powers and cooptation within elite circles. The paper builds on semi-structured interviews and documents, analyzed through situational analysis. Situational analysis allows i) mapping the human and non-human actors involved in monitoring practices, ii) understanding the various temporal, legal, or socio-cultural elements that shape monitoring practices, and iii) grasping the relationships between the actors and elements characterizing various monitoring situations. The paper will hence sketch a clearer picture of monitoring practices during multiple crises, particularly looking at the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the 2019-2020 pandemic crisis. Evidence from the Spanish case will then be included in a broader picture based on secondary data from different contexts.

L'inclusione delle nuove generazioni italiane nei percorsi di partecipazione politica
Sara Fenoglio
Abstract

MIGRATION AS SOCIAL MOVEMENT TRANSFORMING URBAN SPATIALITY. THE CASE OF THE BALKAN ROUTE IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA
Sara Marilungo
Abstract

In recent years critical studies on postcolonial migrations have been characterized by the appearance of a set of reflections known as Autonomy of Migrations (AoM), a theory that allows to reject the representation of mobility as a flow that responds to push-pull factors and, on the contrary, it acknowledges migration as a strategic field populated by subjectivities with different positioning, in which people on the move are political subjects capable of transforming their own lives and the space they cross, acting and modifying the existing relations of power. In particular, the crossing of borders appears as a political and social mobilization characterized by an embodied, collective and non-conforming political action as it presents forms of political sociality that are often not verbalized or made explicit. This representation is possible by rethinking political action as no longer linked to the only appearance in the public space, but as based on the exposure of the racialized and illegalized bodies of people on the move to the dominant power, as a form of potential struggle. Therefore, mobilizations taking place at the border display their political value starting from the attempt of re-appropriation of space that represents a significantly political event without the need for its verbalization. Accordingly and following AoM’s perspective, migration becomes a productive and creative collective force that negotiates and resignifies space. The intent of the proposed contribution is in fact to investigate how people on the move transform urban space. Starting from the observation on the field of people on the move practices and strategies along the Balkan Route in Bosnia, the contribution analyses the relationship between the process of externalization of borders in the European Union and the mobility processes of people on the move who daily attempt to enter the European territory, with the aim of demonstrating how this interaction produces alternative spatialities. The process of Europeanisation and externalization of migration policies not only attempts to erect increasingly rigid and militarized borders, but it also produces new regulation and control systems in neighboring countries, such as reception and confinement centers. However, along migratory routes, in opposition to these centers, illegalized people on move negotiate day by day alternative spatialities and temporalities that transform territories and cities: the informal settlements. The latter are strategic transit hubs generally located in open fields or abandoned infrastructures, emerging from actions and relational practices of illegalized people on move in which they temporary live, access basic needs, services, information and socialization. The reproduction and negotiation of informal settlements appears as “strategies of spatializations” since they configure a reappropriation and a remaking of urban space and sociality according to their needs and their ultimate goal of crossing the border, reconfiguring an alternative “right to the city”. This not only involves the transformation of territories and cities, but it also implies a re-signification of the border as a space for contestation and negotiation, giving rise to conflicts and struggles that contributes to the evolution of European history, which can be rewritten from its margins.

Mobilising after the pandemic: patterns of change in progressive social movement organisations in France
Federica Guardigli
Abstract

Occurring in a context of long-lasting crises across multiple domains, Covid-19 pandemic made visible and exacerbated deep social, political and economic inequalities pervading European societies. In this sense, literature largely read it as a critical juncture, a moment of rupture, of break capable of laying the ground for the building of alternative progressive futures. Social movement literature has been no exception to this line of interpretation. Along with a series of challenges to action, Covid-19 crisis was argued to have opened a window of opportunity for movements to politicise the crisis, questioning emergency policy solutions by showing the structural nature of the crisis and advocating for new paths of progressive systemic change. Accordingly, since 2020 literature became rich in studies addressing contentiousness during the pandemic. These works shed light on how progressive movements strategically adapted their repertoire of action to the pandemic context, appropriating the health and social emergency juncture to forge and spread their narrative of it. However, while several of these studies investigated the features of progressive collective action during the intense time of the lockdown and its aftermath - roughly covering 2020-, we are left comparatively unequipped with an understanding of the post-2020 mobilisation dynamics. At a time when the WHO declared the end to the pandemic as a public health emergency, times are ripe to take stock of the impact of Covid-19 and to address questions regarding its legacies. This implies shifting the analytical focus from the contingent to the medium-term impact of Covid-19 on collective actors. How, if at all, did progressive social movement organisations (hereafter, smos) change after the exhaustion of the emergency phase? Where was change visible? Why did their post-emergency transformational trajectories diverge despite their being structurally constrained by the same contextual circumstances? And how does meso-level change relate to a macro-level context itself moving from the pandemic emergency to the pandemic crisis? This paper tackles these questions by focusing on the trajectories of change of four social movement organisations belonging the progressive social movement milieu of the city of Paris. Not dissimilar to other European countries in terms of government responses to the emergency, France presents three pre-post Covid-19 crisis contextual peculiarities that make it a fascinating case where to investigate change in agency. First, the country was in the middle of the protest cycle against the 2019 project of pension reform when the pandemic broke out. Second, Macron was re-elected at the 2022 presidential elections with Le Pen ranking second though with a rise in turnout compared to the previous 2017 polls. Third, in 2023 the country faced a massive set of street protest against the contested pension reform – on hold from 2019 – that ultimately was approved thanks to the 49.3 Constitutional article, hence without Parliamentary vote. Through semi-structured interviews conducted between January and June 2023, triangulated with documents and data from participant observation, the present contribution deep dives into continuities and ruptures in progressive smos’ agency in what was perceived as a social and political crisis of the country. The paper contribution to social movement scholarship is twofold. First, it engages with the debate on the process of social movements transformation by addressing the impact that the shift from the temporality of the emergency to temporality of crisis has on collective actors. In doing so, it shows how the context shifts alters the conditions for mobilisation, thus engaging with the structure/agency discussion. Second, the paper questions the prevalent interpretation of the pandemic as a critical juncture by assessing its medium-term legacies – if any, at all – on political agency. Overall, by its longitudinal exploration, this paper advocates for a finer understanding of the meaning of change in order to better understand the evolution of progressive agency in a permacrisis context.

Panel 5.6 Social Movements and collective action during current multiple crises (II)

Chairs: Gianni Piazza

Discussants: Giuliana Sorci

Emotions in Labor Conflicts: The "Tarifvertrag Entlastung" at Bonn University Hospital 2022
Jutta Ottilie Lechner
Abstract

ABSTRACT: The aim of the empirical study was to find out which emotions cause a person to become actively involved in a labor dispute. The author accidently came into contact with the issue while approaching Filipino nurses at the University Hospital for a research project of the Southeast Asian Department of Bonn University. At that time the labor union Ver.di had already started its campaign for an agreement on additional staff ("Tarifvertrag Entlastung" TV-E) after a similar campaign at the Berlin Charité in 2021 had been very successful. Now, at the beginning of 2022, Ver.di intended to install such an agreement in all six university hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia (Aachen, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Essen, Cologne, Münster) as well. In Germany, workers in the care sector have hardly been on strike for their needs because in principle care workers – and nurses in particular – are still expected by society to act according to the “Florence Nightingale principle” meaning they do their care work out of the wish to help people in need but not for money – though the nursing profession has very much professionalized due to cost pressure since the introduction of the so-called DRGs (“diagnosis related groups”) at the beginning of the century. Though the pandemic has clearly illuminated the consequences of the DRG system, it is still difficult to get care workers organized in a union. According to the late US concept of organizing, Ver.di, therefore, hired organizers for supporting the campaign. In this context, the author accompanied the organizers to get Filipino nurses for interviews about their (possible) role and participation in the Ver.di campaign. When returning to the organizer´s meeting point, it was a conversation with a nurse at the Bonn University Hospital (UKB) which caught the author´s attention, not because of what this person explained but because of how the person explained it as it became apparent with what obvious emotions the background information conveyed was underpinned. When the author went home and researched the topic of emotions in labor disputes, she found that while there is a great deal of literature on emotions in the workplace, there has been no serious examination of the topic in either political science or sociology because emotions seem to play a role only in psychological contexts. Consultation with the professor whose research interest is in unions and labor conflicts gave the same result. This aroused the curiosity of the author, especially since she followed the entire campaign - including a strike period of 77 days - very intensively. The interviews took place immediately after the strike as during the strike and especially the negotiation phase, in which many of the interviewees had been involved, people were not tangible because the negotiations took mainly place in Cologne. As there were some events during the strike (among others the UKB management went to court to have the strike banned) that were perceived as very impactful by the strikers, a strike reflection was considered to be equally purposeful. Subsequently, a suitable theory was sought that would best reflect the findings obtained. The Intergroup Emotions Theory (IET) was chosen because, according to this theory, emotions are necessary in order to identify with the goals and contents of a particular group. In different social contexts, a person experiences themselves as part of a particular group (Mackie et al. 2008: 1867). This leads to the fact that she not only perceives and interprets the world from the group's point of view (self-categorization), but she also develops the corresponding group-related emotions (self-stereotyping). Based on the IET, it was therefore to be expected that individuals actively engaged in a labor conflict would have to uniformly express emotions such as anger and frustration. On the basis of a convenience sample, a total of 12 guided interviews lasting an average of two hours were conducted as a reflection on the strike with nursing staff of the UKB who had been active in a responsible position during the strike. The coding of the emotions was based on Roseman's (1991: 164) Emotions System, since this offered the broadest spectrum for differentiating emotions with a total of 13 coding options. Subsequently, the interviews were subjected to a contextual content analysis and a descriptive evaluation of the frequency with which different emotions were mentioned was carried out. The results showed that anger and frustration played a role in many of the interviews and were mentioned correspondingly frequently by the respondents, but other emotions such as guilt also played a role. This, in turn, wasn´t to be expected and should, thus, not be underestimated. Outlook: In the meantime, almost a year has passed. The agreement has been in force since the beginning of 2023, but for the strikers, nothing is alright. First, the agreement took about six months to come into effect, while working conditions appeared to be deteriorating and many nurses were leaving Bonn University Hospital. Second, management has a year and a half to install the IT system to accurately account for discharge points. In other words, the success achieved by the strikers in July 2022 after 77 days of strike will not be visible until mid-2024 at the earliest. As the Telegram chat clearly reflects the frustration of the strikers, it will be interesting to see how these results play out and what it will among others mean for future strikes, for Ver.di as union, but also the health care system in Germany with its shortage of skilled workers.

Genova, twenty years on: the role of memory in facing multiple crises.
Pietro Casari, Davide Rocchetti
Abstract

Mobilitazioni silenziose e individuali: la risposta dal basso all’overtourism e all’attacco al “diritto alla città”
Luca Alteri, Alessandro Barile
Abstract

La convivenza tra turisti e residenti si configura da tempo come una delle linee di frattura della società post-democratica e si applica particolarmente a un contesto, come quello urbano, già pesantemente “attenzionato” dal capitalismo contemporaneo, nell’ottica dell’estrazione del plusvalore non solo (e non tanto) dal lavoro, quanto dal territorio. Un fiorente profilo di studi, risalente agli anni Settanta dello scorso secolo, continua a porsi la dirimente domanda: ‘Who owns the city?’, ponendo l’accento sulle forme di “resistenza urbana” che propongono “un’Altra città”, solidale, inclusiva, resiliente, tesa a valorizzare l’attitudine alla cooperazione, piuttosto che le dinamiche della competizione, tra gruppi di interesse come tra individui. L’aiuto dal basso fornito anche in occasione della recente pandemia, espresso ad esempio mediante i pacchi alimentari che organizzazioni politiche e associazioni non governative hanno distribuito e, in alcuni casi, continuano a distribuire, ne costituisce l’evidenza più recente. In una città come Roma, in cui la dimensione turistica è diventata esorbitante a partire dal Giubileo del 2000, il fenomeno dell’overtourism è una variabile strutturale che consolida il meccanismo della gentrificazione, trovando labili freni nelle policy degli enti locali. I quartieri centrali, quelli semi-periferici e l’intera area della “città consolidata” continuano ad avere un’emorragia di residenti e sono del tutto privi di ricambio generazionale, nell’impossibilità – per una nuova famiglia – di trovare un appartamento con un affitto adeguato al livello degli attuali salari, stante l’assoluta inavvicinabilità del mercato delle compravendite immobiliari. A fronte di ciò, si va sviluppando una sensibilità – carsica, individuale e non ancora organizzata in un movimento – di locatori e locatrici che decidono di aderire a formule di affitto a canone concordato, con l’esplicito e consapevole obiettivo di favorire l’insediamento di giovani coppie o di singoli affittuari, rifiutando le “lusinghe” della ricezione turistica breve e informale, spesso mediante piattaforme di condivisione, particolarmente diffusa nelle più importanti città italiane. All’interno di un percorso di indagine sulla città neoliberista che il nostro Osservatorio da tempo persegue – come mostrato nei precedenti convegni annuali della Società Italiana di Scienza Politica – il presente paper si propone di dare visibilità a questo nuovo fenomeno di “riscatto urbano”, intervistando – mediante interviste in profondità e focus group – i proprietari di appartamenti “a uso investimento”, nello specifico di quei quartieri della città di Roma in cui la pratica gentrificatoria è già consolidata (San Lorenzo, Pigneto, Centocelle). Il lavoro di ricerca cercherà di capire se ci troviamo di fronte a casi isolati e “illuminati” oppure a una tendenza in atto, per quanto allo stadio iniziale. Appartenenza di classe, età, anzianità di permanenza nella città, capitale culturale, livello di reddito e valori politici saranno le variabili indagate presso il campione di riferimento, come prime risultanze di una ricerca che si svilupperà nel medio periodo, con il target del 2025: un nuovo Anno giubilare che si pone simbolicamente all’incrocio tra il rischio di un turismo che soverchi “la capacità di carico” della comunità e le forme di resilienza tipiche della società contemporanea (auto-organizzate, pragmatiche, single-issue, post-materialistiche).

Solidarity and Challenges: Italian NGOs Working on Migration and the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic
Mariann Dömös
Abstract

Italy, due to its specific historical, geographical (long coastline) and geopolitical situation (proximity to Africa), has always been involved in migration flows. The direction of migration has varied from time to time: in the 20th century, it was a major country of origin, then characterised by internal migration, and in recent decades it has clearly become a country of destination. Since the 2010s, the country has been faced with a high volume of immigration that has caused problems in various areas of life and has created serious economic, political and social challenges and problems. Policy responses have not always resulted in effective solutions and have often deepened existing problems and generated new ones. At the same time, significant changes have occurred in society, and a part of Italian society has become increasingly sceptical of migration, seeing it as problematic and unmanageable. While nearly nine per cent of the Italian population are immigrants, the main migration policy issues are still to stop irregular migration, keep it outside the country's borders and regularise the legal situation of those already there, thus viewing the phenomenon primarily as a border management issue and have failed to find a truly effective solution to manage the growing migration. In Italy, on the other hand, there is a very strong layer of civil society organisations that have quickly recognised the challenges posed by migration and have tried to provide adequate responses, different narratives and build networks based on mutual trust and solidarity, mainly at the local level, emphasising the importance of integration. In this migration situation, the country was hit by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, becoming one of its worst hotspots. The pandemic affected all aspects of the global political, economic and social systems and had a profound impact on vulnerable groups such as migrant communities. However, Covid-19 has also affected migration trends towards Italy, influencing mobility, migrants' fundamental rights, and living conditions, highlighting and reinforcing pre-existing structural inequalities, vulnerability and the fragility of interdependencies. The epidemic has highlighted the indispensable service that migrants provide in certain sectors (e.g. agriculture, infrastructure, healthcare). However, it also underlined the fact that the impact of the pandemic was more severe among marginalised and vulnerable groups. The epidemic has led the Italian NGOs working on migration to face a number of new challenges and deepening problems, such as the deterioration of the situation of marginalised migrant groups or the increasing difficulty of access to health care for migrants. The lecture will present multiple crises, starting with the immigration wave that unfolded after 2011, and then will mainly analyse the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on migrants and the Italian NGOs working with them. The effects of the Coronavirus disease pandemic on immigration are presented primarily from a bottom-up perspective through the lens of Italian NGOs. The research questions cover the following: How has the pandemic crisis affected migration trends and immigration, what are the major dimensions? How were immigrants affected by the Covid-19 crisis, and what were the short- and long-term effects? What kind of new challenges had to face? How did NGOs manage the changes caused by the pandemic, and what kind of tasks can we observe? What are the solutions to address existing, growing and deepening inequalities? And generally, what can we say about these changes in the post-Covid era, what are the temporary and long-term changes and conclusions in the Italian migration issue caused by the pandemic? The research is part of a series of empirical studies on Italian civil organisations working on migration, which have been ongoing for more than three years, mainly in Rome. To analyse the activities of NGOs during the pandemic, I mainly used primary sources, qualitative research, different types of field research, observations, interviews and case studies, as well as other methodologies, such as snowball sampling and social network analysis. In addition to these, of course, the continuous updating and analysis of secondary sources was also an important endeavour. The paper can shed light on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Italian immigrant communities and the Italian NGOs but also, more broadly, on migration issues in Italy.

Students and workers united! - School student unions and trade unions in the mobilisations of 2014-2015 in Italy
Giuseppe Lipari
Abstract

‘You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf’: Dilemmas, challenges and strategies of Lisbon housing activism amid multiple crises.
Guya Accornero
Abstract

The aim of this paper is to understand which strategies have been implemented by Lisbon right-to-housing activists across multiple crises, and their variation/adaptation along the years. Based on information collected on 1150 social movements’ action taking place between 2012 and 2020, 25 interviews, and on a 9 month-long ethnographic observation between September 2021 and May 2022, the paper will contribute to social movement literature, connecting cycle of protest approach with a relational perspective focusing on networks and solidarity building. According to physic, constructive interference happens when two waves overlap in such a way that they combine to create a larger wave. On the other side, destructive interference happens when two waves overlap in such a way that they cancel each other out. These different mechanisms can serve as a metaphor for looking at the multiple crises which have defined our sociopolitical and economic landscape since the first decade of the 20th century. A few years after the ‘end’ of the great recession, the COVID19 pandemic spread around the globe and this was followed, a little after, by the beginning of the Russian war against Ukraine (with its dramatic consequences in terms of destruction, violence and human losses, but also of inflation and energy crisis). Transversal and interconnected (sub)crises have crossed Europe and the world in the meantime, such as the refugee crisis, the growth of populism and far-right parties, the increase of inequalities, the numerous human-provoked ‘natural’ emergences connected to climate change. Due to the infinite ramifications that each of these crises has, it is difficult to understand if they overlap in a more ‘constructive’ or ‘destructive’ way. What seems nevertheless evident is the fact that they deeply impact each other and that many direct and indirect elements of continuity can be detected among them. Portugal is an emblematic case to understand such dynamics. One of the main strategies to recovery from the 2010 financial and economic crisis was in fact the attraction of foreign capital into the country, through the adoption of different fiscal benefits for the so-called ‘non-usual residents’ and the strong promotion of tourism (which has grown to be the first sector of ‘exportation’). Altogether with other measures adopted under the Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2011 with the Troika, these policies contributed to hypergentrification and over-touristification. In this context, housing prices have seen an exceptional growth, provoking a housing emergency in the country, which was dramatically exposed and deepened by the pandemic. Differently from Spain – where financial crisis was deeply connected to the housing crisis, which led to a powerful movement focused on housing rights – in Portugal it is only after 2015 that the right to housing becomes a visible political demand. Nevertheless, even if not directly addressing housing, the Portuguese anti-austerity cycle of protest (2011-2013) was a crucial moment for the creation of networks, contentious collective identities and mobilization capital, which have been at the basis of Lisbon housing struggle in the following years. If important housing groups already existed, a new generation of contentious players, individual and collective, started to organize for the right to housing in the city after 2015. At the same time, new initiatives started being organized, such as the Caravana da Habitação (Housing Caravan) or the first anti-gentrification demonstration ‘Rock in Riot’. After this period of expansion and increasing visibility of the housing movement, the COVID19 pandemic led to a moment of ‘forced’ latency. This was nevertheless crucial to redefining the strategies and contributed to consolidating the movement’s abeyance structure. The effectiveness of this phase is evident in post-pandemic, with the organization of various and innovative right-to-housing actions in all the country and particularly in Lisbon, such as a large demonstration organized in April 2023, and the promotion of the ‘Referendum pela Habitação’. Against this background, this paper addresses the strategies implemented by Lisbon right to housing activists to give continuity to their networks and structures between moments of visibility and latency and across multiples crises. If social movements scholarship has focused extensively on the role of protest events in the development of mobilizations, less attention has been paid to those activities which are part of mobilization in its different phases (of latency and visibility), but which are not impactful actions developed in the ‘street’. These activities – e.g. dinners, concerts, debates, film screenings, community building initiatives – require organization and planning, and are therefore different from ‘practices’, which are informal everyday actions performed in an almost routine way. We call these actions ‘non-events’ and consider them as movement special strategies implemented during ‘dead time’, that is, the time between protest-events. Protest non-events are fundamental to give mobilization continuity, by maintaining the actors (activists and others) engaged in times of latency, and by building and sustaining socialization processes and networks, as well feelings of solidarity and belonging. We consider that these more or less formal and designed strategies have an important role in giving continuity to social movements across different challenges/crises and they are particularly effective to bridge different periods of mobilizations.

Panel 5.7 Countering the tide: Collective mobilization facing the advance of the far right

Chairs: Davide Rocchetti

Discussants: Francesco Campo

Responses to far-right political violence from a democratic standpoint
Andrea Felicetti, Andrea Terlizzi
Abstract

Small city live: radical right, local power and the role of progressive civil society
Elisa Bellè
Abstract

The so-called Populist Radical Right (PRR) is probably the most studied political family in political science and sociology. Yet, the literature has mainly focused on electoral dynamics, leaving other relevant dimensions little explored. A major gap concerns PRR’s territorial rooting and diversification (Paxton 2019; Chou 2020), as well as its ability to mobilize centre-periphery divides (Hochschild 2016) and community attachments (Fiztgerald 2018), reinforcing its classic nationalist discourse with new localist stances. Secondly, there is an urgent need of more experimental and interdisciplinary analysis of the socio-political processes behind the growth of PRR across societies (Dodd, Lamont, Savage 2017), which are often accompained by high levels of conflict, polarization and countermobilization between PRR’s partisans and opponents. In my contribution, I deal with these crucial, yet overlooked topics, focusing on two major PRR European parties, the Italian Lega and the French Rassemblement national. Basing on an innovative mix of ethnographic immersion and comparison, I analyze their local access to mainstream in two medium-sized cities, located in two regions of historical rootedness (Lombardia in Italy and PACA in France). Crossing the disciplinary borders between political science and sociology, I shed light on the local dynamics of conflict, countermobilization and polarization between the two parties and their main civic opponents, answering the following questions: How do the parties manage their new power position, once elected? Which are the main conflicts generated by their local governance? And which are the social actors and repertoires of action mobilized by this conflictuality? In order to obtain a thick description (Geertz 1973) of the public and political local life of the cities, I conducted 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork in each of them, mixing diverse data collection techniques: participant observation of the main public and political events; 40 in depth interviews with party’s militants, leaders, and elected in the two local administrations (20 for each case); 30 in-depth interviews with influential members of local civic organizations (15 for each case). After detailing the research design, context of the research ad data collection techniques, I present the main results emerged from the two case studies. I will focus in particular on two controversies, one for each case, that proved to have a strong contentious effect and at the same time are particularly representative of the local politics and policies of the two parties. I conclude by discussing comparatively the analogies and differences between them, and proposing a broader reflection on the dynamics of institutionalization of PRR parties today and of countermobilization of local civil societies to contrast this rise.

“We Are Indivisible” Countering Right-Wing Populism in the US in the Aftermath of Donald Trump
Nicolò Pennucci
Abstract

This paper results from a research on the civil society reaction to right-wing populism in power through a case study on the “Indivisible Movement” and its struggle in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump in the United States. It presents the provisional results of a broader comparative study on the civil society reaction to right-wing populism in Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. The research question it aims to answer is how social movements are implementing a process of reactive political identity construction - i.e. political identification (Panizza, 2017) - and a political counter-strategy (Meyer and Staggemborg, 1997)? Specifically, it aims to tackle such a research question through a mixed-method research design combining qualitative interviews with founders. social media managers and local organizers and a two-step quantitative text analysis made of LDA Topic Modelling and a Dictionary Based Method Content Analysis performed on all the available Facebook posts of the selected movement “Indivisible Movement”. Through such a methodology, it aims at shedding light on the role of the social media strategy in both the process of political identity construction and the process of countering right-wing populism offline. Theoretically speaking, this study aims at contributing to the existing literature in a threefold way. It aims at developing the innovative concept of counter-populism as a specific feature of social movement activism against right-wing populism. Through this concept, it aims at overcoming certain limitations of the currently employed concept of anti-populism, that usually only refers to established political parties (and their leaders) rejecting populism on the assumption of considering populism an existential threat for democracy. By looking at understudied actors (namely social movements) employing an innovative strategy, it is possible to broaden our understanding of the relationship between populism anti-populism and (liberal) democracy By looking specifically at the social media dimension of social movements’ political strategy, this study aims at critically engaging with the question of the role of political identity construction in digital activism. By taking populism as a way of political identification (Panizza, 2017) as a theoretical framework, the study emphasizes the role of constructing competitive collective identity to the ones created by the right-wing populist actors by looking specifically at the way through which social media represents a sort of conflictual dimension for the creation of competitive collective identities social media in such a process, so to fill a gap in the Social Movement Media Complex literature that usually denies the role of collective identity construction in digital politics By considering social movements opposing right-wing populism in power as a social actor trying to counter a specific political operation (namely stopping policies and creating competing collective identity) this study aims at inserting counter-populism in the literature on the movement/countermovement dynamics, by positioning the progressive movements in the countermovement spectrum, as reactive to the right-wing populism that gained an hegemonic position in society Overall, this study aims at creating new theoretical insights on the role of civil society in countering right-wing populism, by highlighting theoretical innovations in the relationship between populism, anti-populism and liberal democracy as well as the role of social media in digital activism while dealing with processes of identity construction. At the empirical level, it aims at fostering the use of mixed-methods in a traditionally qualitative field.