Thèses sur le sujet « Social movements – Italy »

This thesis examines the continuing significance in contemporary Italy of the Italian new social movement of 1973-83, Autonomia, by positing it as a movement of refusal: of capitalist work, of the party form, of the clandestine form of political violence, and of the politics of 'taking power'. It was in discontinuity with the value systems of the reformist Old Left and the revolutionary New Left, but in continuity with contemporary Italian antagonist and global anti-capitalist movements. In defining the research subject, the concept of individual and collective autonomy emerges as a central characteristic of the Italian new social movements. Autonomy is understood not only as independence from the capitalist State and economy and their institutions of mediation, but also as the self-determination of everyday life, related to the needs, desires and subjectivity of what Italian 'workerism' defined as the Fordist 'mass worker' and the post-Fordist 'socialised worker'. Using the 'class composition' theoretical perspective of Autonomist Marxism to critique classical Marxism, neo-Marxism and new social movement theory's minimalisation of the political content of new social movements and dismissive analysis of Autonomia, the scope of research was limited to the interpretation of 48 interviews of former participants and observers, of primary texts produced by Autonomia and of secondary accounts based on 'collective historical memory'. The thematic framework consists of chapters on workers' autonomy and the refusal of work; forms of political organisation and violence involving 'organised', 'diffused' and 'armed' Autonomia; and on the youth counter-cultures and antagonist communication of 'creative Autonomia' and the 1977 Movement. The thesis concludes that Autonomia expressed the violent social conflicts produced by the rapid transformation of an industrial into a post-industrial society, but ultimately was only a partial break from the traditions and practices of the Old and New Lefts, leaving an ambiguous legacy for contemporary Italian autonomous social movements.

This thesis is based on an ethnographic study of entrepreneurs of the construction business in Lombardy, Northern Italy. The aim is to gain some understanding of this business, of entrepreneurialism, and of individuals in a non-stereotypical light through a full and complex account of their daily lives. The aim is to reveal the thoughts, actions and strategies of particular local actors in their everyday contingency and contradictoriness. No attempt is made to simplify the complexity of their understandings and practices for the sake of producing a single encompassing and consistent image. Many similarities were found between the practices of entrepreneurialism and those of the discipline of anthropology. Knowledge and information are constantly sought after but are recognised as emerging in unexpected places and times and as being socially negotiated. Apprenticeship is often used as a methodology, and learning often happens through experience. Contextual application of knowledge is seen as essential. In order to exchange information and knowledge, to collaborate with other businessmen or to simply get a job, trust is fundamental and constantly negotiated. Personal relationships and trust become particularly important in an uncertain market situation, as ways to face risk. Trust is acquired slowly and accorded contextually, through face-to-face interaction and cultivated relationships, but also through positive recommendations or simply a feeling of sympathy. Knowledge, apprenticeship, trust and risk are key themes of the thesis. The blurred borders between the distinct individual personalities of my informants and their collective identities and commonalities are also discussed. The personality of an entrepreneur is seen as ideally complex, in which many (possibly contradictory) characteristics can be expected to be present, but also ideally balanced, each manifesting itself in specific situations. The ethnography also explores the fragility of the entrepreneur, in apparent contradiction to their strong and charismatic personalities. It is seen to be despite and because of their positions of power that they also feel vulnerable: their discourse is imbued with their fears for their businesses in a difficult period of economic crisis. Finally, through a ubiquitous desire to control markets and the future, we also encounter forms of corruption; corruption that is often condemned verbally but nevertheless is present in the business world and amplified by public and media discourses. The mechanisms by which work that is put out to tender is subject to possible manipulation are examined, and the ideas of the entrepreneurs about these practices are described—again demonstrating how thoughts and practices are often self-contradictory in their contextual relevance and application.

Orientador: Andréia Galvão
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
Made available in DSpace on 2018-12-07T17:47:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Schembri_Elena_M.pdf: 2426969 bytes, checksum: 4919eed98a6c166ce73deb8fbae659e9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014
Resumo: As teses sobre o desaparecimento do campesinato se revelaram incorrectas embora seja necessário afirmar que a ofensiva neo-liberal, os tratados de livre comércio e as imposições de algumas empresas multinacionais com a cumplicidade dos governos, hoje, certamente, afetam com maior profundidade a produção agrícola e as comunidades rurais de todas as partes do mundo, impondo um único modelo ao qual é muitas vezes difícil escapar. As respostas dos camponeses a estes tipos de problemas é a organização que pode acontecer de maneira similar e diferente ao mesmo tempo. A análise de duas experiências de resistências camponesas em países distintos, a cooperativa brasileira Copava e a associação italiana Campi Aperti, pode ajudar na compreensão dos tipos de problemas específicos de cada realidade política, econômica e social, enquanto oferece uma visão sobre as consequiências da mundialização em curso. O 1995, ano de fundação da Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC), marca uma data fundamental, com a liberalização do comércio dos produtos agrícolas. A análise do desenvolvimento do agronegócio no Brasil, particularmente ápos a crise europeia de 2008 que viu muitos investidores transferir seus capitais na América Latina, e a terceira crise agrícola que afeta a Europa, junto com o contexto histórico e político, ajudarão na compreensão das dinâmicas empreendidas pela Copava e por Campi Aperti que lidam com as mudanças do contexto no qual agem. Agroecológia, agricultura biológica, reforma agrária popular proposta pelo Mst e economia solidária, serão os temas conclusivos que ajudarão entender qual é o projeto levado para frente por essas duas organizações para responder ao lema "Um outro mundo é possível?"
Abstract: The thesis about the disappearance of the peasantry proved incorrect although we must say that the neo-liberal offensive, the free trade agreements and the charges of some multinational companies with the complicity of governments, today certainly affect more depth agricultural production and rural communities in all parts of the world, imposing a single model that is often difficult to escape. The responses of farmers to these types of problems is the organization that can happen in a similar way and different at the same time. The analysis of two experiences of peasant resistance in different countries, the Brazilian cooperative Copava and the Italian association Campi Aperti, can help in understanding the types of problems specific to each political, economic and social, while providing an insight into the globalization of consequiências ongoing. The 1995 founding year of the World Trade Organization (WTO), marks a key date, with the liberalization of trade in agricultural products. The development of agribusiness in Brazil, particularly after the European crisis of 2008 that saw many investors transfer their capital in Latin America, and the third agricultural crisis affecting Europe, along with the historical and political context, will help in understanding the dynamics undertaken by Copava and Campi Aperti dealing with the context of changes in which they act. Agroecology, organic farming, popular agrarian reform proposed by Mst and solidarity economy, will be the conclusive issues that will help understand what the project brought forward by these two organizations to respond to the slogan "Another world is possible?"
Mestrado
Ciencia Politica
Mestra em Ciência Política

This research project assesses the relationship between the use of Facebook and the development of social movements throughout their life cycle by focusing on the case study of Popolo Viola. On 5th December, 2009, hundreds of thousands of Italian citizens took to the streets of Rome to say ‘no’ to the politics of Silvio Berlusconi’s government and to ask for his resignation as Prime Minister. The demonstration was planned and organized, mainly on Facebook, by a group of bloggers. A single-issue protest rapidly evolved into a social movement, called ‘Popolo Viola’, ‘Purple People’. The colour purple was chosen because it was not previously associated with any political movement, and as a word to the wise that the movement was not linked to any political party. New groups and pages arose on Facebook: apart from the page ‘il Popolo Viola’, which now had more than 460,000 members (data August, 2013), thousands of pages and groups were opened at a local level, both inside and outside Italy. Through the lenses of Social Movement Theory and the Critical Theory of Technology this study focuses on the role played by the use of Facebook in the development of the movement’s organizational structure, the building of its collective identity, and its mobilization processes. The methodology adopted for this purpose includes both quantitative and qualitative methods: on the one hand, there is an analysis of membership data and interaction levels on the Popolo Viola Facebook page, and a survey; on the other hand, there are in-depth interviews with the Facebook page administrators, influential members and activists of the movement, and content analysis of the online conversations among activists. The findings of this research show how Facebook proved to be an efficient mobilizing structure for the social movement only on a short-term basis. After its initial success, the incompatibility between the commercial interests behind Facebook’s design, and the ideology of Popolo Viola became manifest. Facebook failed to provide the movement with the necessary instruments in terms of a shared democratic management of its resources. The inability to manage Facebook pages and groups according to commonly agreed values promoted vertical power structures within the movement, contributing to controversial management of the Facebook page and to internal divisions which significantly hindered the potential of the anti-Berlusconi protest. Moreover, gradual changes in the Facebook code increasingly promoted top-down flows of communication which, in conjunction with controversial decisions in the moderation of discussions that were made by the page administrators, progressively decreased the plurality of voices within the movement’s page, and hampered the formation of a strong collective identity. Facebook therefore proved to represent much more than a mere communication tool for Popolo Viola, playing a vital role in influencing the movement’s structure, leadership, communication flows and collective identity. The rise and fall of Popolo Viola, with all its complexity, constitutes a useful case study of the evaluation of technology as a problematic force for social change. That said, this is not an issue which relates to the technology itself, but rather to the values and interests that drive the actors who are involved in this power struggle. Taking into account the relationships between culture, technology and capital, this study offers a balanced assessment of the dynamics which characterize the development of social movement protest on commercial Social Network Media.

In the last years we have witnessed an ever-increasing politicization of urban tourism. The questioning of the tourist industry, which has become part of the actions of several groups of citizens, has proved to be as articulated as diversified. Often, many of these protests share the proliferation of creative tactics that highlight the relation between the symbolic mediation and the resignification of public space. Through an ethnographic work, which runs between the urban centres of Barcelona and Venice, the research fits inside the increasing dynamicity of the present critique to the touristification of the city. Moreover, it analyses different forms of protest, which directly emerge from grassroot projects and aim to a socio-political change. The purpose is to contribute and problematize in a complex way to the debate on contemporary forms of claim within the touristified city. On the whole, the thesis wants to be an incursion by social sciences in the debate on overtourism. The aim is to integrate spatial, cultural and reflexive focus both on the urban collectives and the researcher that approaches such practices.
Negli ultimi anni si è assistito ad una crescente politicizzazione del turismo urbano. La critica all’industria turistica, entrata ormai nell’agenda delle azioni di diversi gruppi cittadini, si è dimostrata tanto articolata quanto diversificata. Spesso, molte di queste proteste condividono la proliferazione di tattiche creative che rendono evidente il rapporto tra mediazione simbolica e risignificazione dello spazio pubblico. Attraverso un lavoro etnografico che si snoda tra i centri urbani di Barcellona e Venezia, la ricerca si inserisce all’interno di questa crescente dinamicità dell’attuale critica alla turistificazione della città ed analizza diverse forme di protesta che emergono direttamente da progetti dal basso ed aspirano ad un cambiamento socio- politico. L’obiettivo è quello di contribuire e problematizzare in maniera complessa il dibattito sulle forme contemporanee di rivendicazione all’interno della città turistica. Nel complesso, la tesi si presenta come un’incursione delle scienze sociali nel dibattito sull’overtourism con il proposito di integrare focus spaziali, culturali e riflessivi sia dei collettivi urbani, sia dello stesso ricercatore che si avvicina a queste pratiche.

This thesis asks ‘what does Europeanisation mean for the strategies and practices of grassroots green groups in Europe?’ and aims to identify the conditions under which these groups become ‘europeanised’. I identify three process of europeanisation: direct europeanisation – when an actor connects directly to the EU, indirect europeanisation – when an actor connects to a europeanised member state and passive europeanisation – when actors europeanise outside of state mechanisms. The grassroots green movement has largely evaded studies of europeanisation and so it is through examining europeanisation at this ‘base’ level, closest to the citizens, that this research makes an original contribution to our understanding of the variables that mediate the process of europeanisation and to our understanding of grassroots green activism in Europe. This thesis takes its analytical framework from social movement theory and uses political opportunity structures and frames as domains in which it looks for evidence of europeanisation. Within these domains I distinguish between European and europeanised activity, teasing out the role of the nation state in mediating europeanisation at a grassroots level. Two cases are examined: anti-road protest and anti-GM protest in Britain, France and Italy between the period 2007-2010. This thesis demonstrates that there is some evidence of europeanisation within grassroots green groups. It encourages a more nuanced understanding of europeanisation as a process that can occur outside the state and amongst actors who do not seek to impact the EU. It finds that both strategic and ideological considerations shape the political opportunity structures to which movements direct themselves. It also finds that the fit between the frames used in protest and the national masterframes is a powerful variable in explaining the extent of social movement europeanisation.

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

La thèse porte sur la langue et les discours de la contestation en Italie dans les années 1970. L'étude vise à définir les enjeux et les représentations qui ont prévalu dans l'utilisation de certains mots plutôt que d'autres, en essayant de se placer du point de vue des acteurs qui ont vécu la période. Elle analyse d'une part l'utilisation de certains mots dans la langue politique de l'époque, en la comparant avec la production analogue précédente, et notamment avec les traditions politiques de référence.Elle étudie d'autre part la spécificité de la langue de la période en s'interrogeant sur la question d'un lexique politique propre à une époque donnée. Elle étudie enfin les débats linguistiques qui ont accompagné cette modification du lexique politique, en s'attachant plus particulièrement aux textes qui ont marqué des tournants linguistiques et idéologiques.L'étude vise à adopter une démarche scientifique qui comprend une historicisation précise des textes et des enjeux de leur écriture et qui a été définie par l'expression " philologie politique ".À travers la description d'un corpus très varié, comportant les textes politiques de référence (articles de journaux, tracts, affiches, documents théoriques, débats) produits par les organisations majeures d'extrême gauche (gauche extraparlementaire, mouvements, lutte armée) et leur interaction avec d'autres types de discours (Pci, Dc, presse) ; mais aussi des textes historiographiques et différentes formes de témoignage, cette étude pose la question plus générale de la création d'une langue politique propre à une époque donnée et du caractère particulier de la langue politique des années 1970 en Italie.

Defence date: 21 July 2014
Examining Board: Professor Donatella della Porta, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor László Bruszt, European University Institute; Professor Lance Bennett, University of Washington; Professor Mario Diani, Università degli Studi di Trento.
In 2011, a vast coalition of social movement actors coordinated one of the largest and most successful political campaign that characterized recent Italian history, organizing and winning a referendum that blocked a serious attempt to privatize the entire water distribution network. In a year characterized by intense mobilizations throughout the world – with the Occupy, the 15-M and the so called Arab Spring protests dominating the scene – the main Italian organizations and networks coalesced, with the external support of some small declining or newly formed parties, and gradually captured an increasing attention in society. The main environment of action of the Referendum supporters slowly passed from the Italian streets, assemblies, and squares, to the websites of the organizations, and – during the very last phase of the campaign – to Facebook, finally conquering at least in part the very closed space of the Italian mass media. On Facebook, in particular, the politically oriented communication of the referendum supporters proved to be very pervasive: the words referendum and quorum were the most present in the statuses of the Italian users of this platform for the entire 2011. The dissertation explores in detail this successful campaign, focusing on how the activists elaborated new strategies of online communication and on the processes of adaptation that the emergence of the Social Media in the Italian political environment promoted in this social movement milieu. Adopting a very wide set of methodologies, which includes Digital Ethnography, Social Network Analysis, interviews and data collection through computer programming in Python, the author explores different aspects of the mobilization that are particularly relevant for the broader discussion on online activism and campaigning. In particular, he traces the network of websites that supported the campaign, he observes the online communication practices of the activists on the web and Facebook, he describes the link that connects online and off-line activism during this large-scale campaign, and he connects the different ways of perceiving the social media environment with divergent uses of these platforms.

Defence date: 25 July 2018
Examining Board: Professor Donatella della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore (EUI Supervisor); Professor Philippe C. Schmitter, EUI; Professor Luke March, University of Edinburgh; Professor Kenneth M. Roberts, Cornell University
Since the 1990s, the progressive transformation of social-democratic parties into catch-all organizations, with a light ideological baggage and lack of social rootedness, has negatively influenced their relationship with the social movements. While losing their traditional institutional reference point, social movements are experiencing new forms of interaction with other party families – e.g. the Greens, the radical left and hybrid parties such as the Italian Five Star Movement. Accordingly, this study examines the ‘strategic interactions’ between the main ‘renewed’ (or ‘refounded’) radical left-wing parties (RLPs) and the left-wing social movements in Italy and Greece from 1999 to the present. The goal is to identify the processes by which the interactions between the two actors take shape, and the factors that contribute to success and failure in building them. To this end, I take into account both the adaptive changes that the RLPs have enacted under the impulse of social movements and the reactions of social movements to those party transformations. First, I distinguish between three party dimensions – organization (structure and internal mechanisms), political culture (values and political issues), and strategies (alliances within the political system) – and verify whether social movements represented a stimulus for RLPs to set in motion a process of change. Second, I consider how movement-oriented party transformations retroact on the movements’ perception of RLPs. The analysis shows that movement mobilization was an opportunity for the RLPs to emerge from the sidelines and achieve greater recognition. Nonetheless the changes they implemented differed, nor was their transformation equal in its strength and duration. While variation can be observed even over the same case through time, the macro result is that Greek RLPs adopted greater movement-oriented changes that helped them in cultivating stronger ties to social movements than their Italian cousins. The explanation for these differences is found in the combination of the RLPs’ heterodox political culture, higher and constant levels of double membership in both the party and the movements, and social movements’ instrumental attitude towards political institutions.

Defence date: 18 October 2018
Examining Board: Prof. Donatella Della Porta, Scuola Normale Superiore (EUI Supervisor); Prof. Luigi Pellizzoni, University of Pisa (External Co-Supervisor); Prof. Stéphane Van Damme, European University Institute and Sciences Po Paris; Prof. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, New York University
Mobilizations on high-tech projects often become arenas of contention where expertise crosses political and technical claims. One of the aspects of these citizen mobilizations resides in the elaboration of alternative politics linking bottom-up communitarian knowledge with expert advice. This innovation addresses important questions for participation and democracy in general, since expert knowledge indeed maintains a delicate relationship with democratic politics. In this work I aim to analyze how common citizens, political activists and technical experts participate in using expertise, while contributing to making «technical democracy» work. Starting from a dataset of more than 500 episodes of contention regarding high-tech projects, I focus on an in-depth comparative study of mobilizations in the cities of Venice and Florence, given their importance in the rise of the so called «new environmentalism» in Italy. Analyzing four protest campaigns I shed light on the mechanisms of co-production. focusing on 1) the characteristics of bottom-up citizens’ expertise, 2) experts’ enrollment and their peculiar forms of engagement. In both cities I have selected two cases depending on their variation in terms of technological complexity, conflict intensity and citizens' participation. While in some high-tech projects political conflict and technical controversy tend to be confined to restricted mobilizations – regarding mainly activists and experts – others show high levels of participation and broader knowledge diffusion. Crossing these two main dimensions – political conditions and technological factors – allows to look at the role of different expert cultures (professional and disciplinary background) and their interaction/intersection with political cultures (e.g. political ecologist, conservationist, environmentalist). These dimensions helps explain different typologies of expert enrollment, whether its participation is more organic to movement areas (expert-activist) or more episodic and linked to single-issue justifications (expert-ally). After a careful analysis of the Italian public debate about high-tech projects, a specific media analysis of the four cases in national and local newspapers, a multivariate ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in both cities that included direct attendance at public meetings, assemblies and demonstrations. Moreover, around 60 in-depth and semi-structured interviews were conducted with public authorities, experts, activists and citizens playing a central role in the mobilization. The outcomes show how conflict, rather than inhibiting it, transforms expertise production into a contentious politics by other means. Being understood as intrinsically linked to political interests, the meaning of contentious expertise needs therefore to be understood in terms of crisis of democratic accountability and legitimation. The use of expertise by social movements has, finally, a clear impact on their structure and composition, giving rise to uncertain and unexpected alliances as well as shifts regarding mechanisms of participation and mobilization.

Citizen deliberation is a fundamental concern for deliberative theories of democracy. Early deliberative theorists tied the prospects for a democratic society to the possibility of realising democratic deliberation within publics at large, not just institutions. Nonetheless, circumscribed citizens' or representatives' assemblies have often been identified as the very loci where democratic deliberation could be pursued, whilst the possibility of deliberation within the public sphere has been neglected. The empirical investigation of the deliberative and democratic qualities in the public sphere remains necessary, as well as an understanding of what aspects may hinder or foster quality discursive engagement. The increasingly advocated systemic approach to deliberative democracy calls for a refined understanding of organisations in the public sphere. This study provides an investigation of the qualities of citizens' engagement from a deliberative democratic standpoint. The key concept through which such qualities are investigated is 'deliberative capacity', which is seen in terms of the extent to which organisations host authentic, inclusive, and consequential discursive processes. This work, in particular, is based on a comparative study of four grassroots local initiatives, two from Australia (in Tasmania and Queensland) and two from Italy (in Emilia-Romagna and Sicily). The case studies under examination are associated with Transition, a contemporary movement fighting peak oil and resource depletion through the development of community-level activism. In the initial part, this work discusses the idea of deliberative capacity in light of the wider debates in the field and adapts this concept to suit the empirical investigation of organisations in the public space. Next, the interpretive and qualitative research methodology and relevant literature are presented. Social movement scholarship emerges as the area which has most closely investigated the issues under examination in this work and therefore it receives particular attention throughout the text. The Transition movement is then introduced. After presenting the main features of the movement, Transition is examined through social movement literature and framed within deliberative democratic theory. Four case studies are thus developed. Each of them provides an in-depth understanding and an assessment of the discursive processes characterising the various activities taking place. The ensuing comparative analysis sheds light on the overall deliberative and democratic qualities of these organisations and the way in which deliberative capacity was developed. This research shows that the deliberative and democratic qualities of community-based organisations vary significantly, from particularly problematic to satisfying. In line with earlier studies, the main dynamics accounting for the development of deliberative capacity are found in the interaction of two sets of aspects: the organisations' internal features and the context surrounding them. Deliberative capacity is generated when participants find that adopting and developing deliberative and democratic qualities is valuable in itself and necessary in influencing the local publics and institutions. The findings may inform future theoretical advancement, particularly with regard to the role and potential that organisations in the public space may have in deliberative systems.

Examining board: Prof. François Chazel, Université de Paris Sorbonne ; Prof. Donatella Della Porta (Università degli Studi di Firenze) ; Prof. Michel Dobry (Université de Paris X) ; Prof. Klaus Eder, supervisor, EUI/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ; Prof. Ioannis Papadopoulos (Université de Lausanne)
Defence date: 15 January 1996
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

Defence Date: 16/10/2009
Examining Board: Bianca Beccalli (University of Milan); Nick Couldry (University of London); Donatella Della Porta (EUI) (Supervisor); Peter Wagner (University of Trento, formerly EUI)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
The dissertation addresses the general question of how social movements interact with the media in contemporary, media-saturated societies. The basic assumption is that visibility in the media is crucial to become recognized and thus valuable social and political subjects. This is especially true for resource-poor groups of activists at the margins of the political field who aim to introduce new social problems into the public arena. Compared to past decades, however, visibility today holds a different meaning, and passes through different channels due to the emergence of information and communication technologies which have transformed mainstream-dominated media systems into more nuanced and complex media environments. The dissertation is based on an interdisciplinary analysis about how social and political actors involved ingrassroots mobilizations against insecure employment in Italy and Europe seek visibility at the public level by acting in complex, multilayered media environments. In doing so, the dissertation presents three relevant novelties in two strands of literature: social movements studies and communication/media studies. At first, the analysis revolves around the concept of activist media practices and three important dimensions that emerged from the investigation: media representation of activists and mobilizations; activists’ perceptions of the media environment; and interactions between social movements and the media. The former and the latter have been addressed in the literature, but separately and without comparing how they develop with regard to different types of media outlets. Scholars in the field, moreover, do not usually consider activists’ perceptions of the media environment, despite the relevance this dimension has for understanding activist media practices. Second, the analysis is based on a comparative research design which takes into consideration three territorial levels (transnational, national and local), three types of media outlets (mainstream, sympathetic and alternative, with the second never having been empirically explored in studies about social movements and the media), and a number of media technologies (from the press to the Internet). The dissertation compares a broad range of (activist) media practices which the existing literature in the field considers separately, while in reality they develop in parallel and often intertwine. Third, the empirical research on which the dissertation is based deals with a critical area of investigation, the realm of insecure and precarious jobs. Despite the fact that this issue has already been addressed by several disciplines, including the sociology of work and industrial relations, there is only a sporadic and fragmented body of literature about mobilizations of precarious workers in Italy and Europe. After a theoretical and methodological introduction, the dissertation empirically explores the three above-mentioned dimensions of activist media practices in complex media environments. Conclusions recompose the three dimensions of activist media practices (representation, perception and recognition) in complex media environments, taking into consideration the literature on the sociology of practices and insights from two relevant theoretical approaches: field theory and actor network theory. Additionally, the conclusions discuss the empirical and theoretical validity of three relevant concepts in the field of media and social movements: 'sympathetic media', the 'discursive opportunity structure' and the 'communication repertoire'.

Defence date: 7 December 2011
Examining Board: Examining Board: Prof. Donatella Della Porta, European University Institute (supervisor); Prof. László Bruszt, European University Institute; Prof. Rudy Andeweg, Leiden University; Prof. Thomas Poguntke, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf"
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
The independent and spontaneous mobilization of social movements during the late 1970s challenged political parties in their very fundamental function of political linkage and has often been deemed a symptom of a crisis of political parties as representative agents. For the first time, it seemed that ‘the political’ extended to other spheres of civil society beyond the traditional party channels. This thesis examines the responses of political parties to social movements in Italy and the Netherlands from the 1970s to the 1980s. Because of their closeness in terms of political identity, social movement scholars have tended to concentrate on the responses of left-wing political parties to social movements. This thesis, which also incorporates this common inquiry, also examines the responses to the social movements of the more distant center-right parties. The major questions that it attempts to answer are: did the observed political parties actually respond to the emergence of social movements? What types of responses did they engage in? What factors explain the variation in the parties’ responses? Each empirical chapter examines the individual party responses to the two most numerically significant social movements that emerged in the Italian and the Dutch national contexts. Drawing on Gamson’s typology of social movements’ success (1975) and on further elaborations of different types of social movements’ ‘impact’, the analysis classifies different party responses by dimension (party discourse and party organization) and type (direct and indirect). Empirical results reveal how, despite the fact that party identity explains variation in the degree to which parties responded to social movements, with parties on the left showing greater responsiveness as compared to center parties, the latter did not remain unaffected by the emergence of social movements. Moreover, results show how also for the case of the leftwing parties, a total adherence to the social movements’ demands did not take place. A two-fold conclusion can be drawn. On the one hand, political parties do channel social movements’ demands, therefore satisfying their function of political representation. On the other hand though, the two worlds of political parties and social movements remain separate, as the inherent constraints of representative government only allow parties to bring forward the social movements’ demands in a mediated form, distant from the movements’ original demands.

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies
Social networks are now an increasingly used tool, but analysis possibilities have not yet been fully exploited. In particular, the extraction of information from users' profiles and their processing could give different information. In this work we will focus on the possibilities of using this information to analyse the patterns of rural spaces. The work will be carried out through a review of the available bibliography on the topic, the construction of an application, and the subsequent analysis of the data extracted through the application. Based on the findings, suggestions are made about the intensity of people within an area or the changes that have occurred in social activities.

Defence date: 9 July 2001
Examining Board: Prof. Dr. Marina Cattaruzza, Universität Bern ; Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Höpken, Georg-Eckert-Institut für Schulbuchforschung Braunschweig / Universität Leipzig ; Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kaschuba, Humboldt-Universität Berlin ; Prof. Dr. Bo Stråth, Europäisches Hochschulinstitut Florenz
First made available online on 4 May 2018