Search results for "Politics"

Politiche della cucina: una prospettiva semiotica

2021

The title of the famous 2003 film by Tassos Boulmetis uses a hyponym in Italian (A touch of ginger), as it happens in Spanish (Un toque de canela). In English it was preferred to use a hypernym (A Touch of Spices). In Portuguese (O tempero da vida) the theme of spices disappears but the idea of essentiality remains, as a gustatory metaphor (salt is taste by definition), of the detail that makes the difference. The original Greek reads Πολìτικη Κουζìνα, an expression with a double semantic value, given that we can translate it either as The kitchen of the city (understood as Istanbul, the urban center that invests the heart of the story) or, better, as Political kitchen. This plethora of tit…

Propaganda alimentare

2020

How can we investigate the symbolic meaning of food without reading the thoughts of those who eat? The answer can be found in the slogans that advertising proposes. Advertising, in fact, has precisely the role of constructing the "good to think" of which anthropology speaks, and not because of some kind of occult power that is occasionally attributed to it, but because of the social function it performs. What it does is to make a given product relevant within a wider system composed of many others, but also of values, problems, traditions, tastes, disgusts, principles and practices. Advertising has, in a certain sense, made its own the function of the ancient storytellers who, by declaiming…

Politiche del reale. Sulla testimonianza fotografica

2021

Not only, as Barthes has shown, are photographs photographs are complex objects, endowed with a high degree of depth and of depth and considerable semantic possibilities but, as Floch has Floch argued, the testimonial one is only one effect of meaning among the many that they can produce. From this derives a twofold necessity. The first has to do with the caution that must characterize the approach to images. approach to images. A photograph is not a fact, it means it, and like every process of signification it presupposes a point of view a point of view, and therefore an ideology, which is revealed only when it becomes possible to only when it becomes possible to reconstruct what is missin…

Introduzione: di sardine e d’altri linguaggi politici

2019

At the market in via Drapperie, in Bologna, in mid-November 2019, sardines were sold for three euros a kilo. In more than one fish shop, the price was the same as always, no significant variation. Yet nearby, in the immense Piazza Maggiore, in those very days sixteen thousand and more sardines were playing the leading role, tight squeezes, not only producing an unexpected result against the aggressiveness of the right, the league and populist sovereignty, but inventing a new form of political expression: an ironic flash mob in the name of a world figure – the Sardinian, in fact – not particularly heroic or in any way handsome. A figure who – based on the well-known media mechanism of "conta…

Legitimizing sex and empowerment : an interpretation of narratives on sex trade in Thailand

2015

This research investigates how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working against human trafficking in Thailand and male tourists travelling to Thailand for sex legitimize their actions and perspectives on their websites. The research material is constituted by two websites for each of both categories. Plot analysis was used as a main method, based on Northrop Frye’s mythoi and Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic hexad. Subsequently, plots were deconstructed by pointing out omissions, inconsistencies, and dualities. From the analysis, it derived that all parties produce a form of knowledge that legitimizes their power, which in turn is necessary in order to produce knowledge. They sample the pop…

Qualche domanda (sul) queer in Italia

2010

Nostalgia, community and resistance : Counter-cultural politics in a Finnish skinzine

2019

Culture and community building are an essential part of the appeal of the far-right and fascist movements. Studying their cultural products is therefore important for a deeper understanding of the movement and their modus operandi. One elemental part of their culture are the so-called zines, small-scale do-it-yourself magazines intended for scene members. In certain respects, the far-right zines, skinzines, follow the forms and trends of other underground publications, especially punk-zines, with which they also share the resistance identity as stigmatized and marginalized actors. However, the political visions in skinzines are more or less opposite to ‘democratic zines’, creating certain t…

Do social networks bridge political divides? The analysis of VKontakte social network communication in Ukraine

2014

New electronic forms of political communication have become increasingly popular in countries with weak democratic institutions. The effectiveness of these new forms of association in altering political behavior, however, remains uncertain even in developed democratic regimes. This paper investigates connections between regional variation in electoral behavior and regional distribution of electronic social networks in the case of Ukraine's polarized and institutionally unstable democracy. Our analysis of online networks shows that, somewhat contrary to conventional wisdom, electronic communication does not bridge political divides. This finding casts doubt on the effectiveness of online for…

Constructing social Europe through European cultural heritage

2021

The political and economic crises of the recent decades as well as the new changes brought on by globalization and digitalization have contributed to exacerbate social inequalities and injustice and revealed different social realities in Europe. The EU increasingly deals with social issues in its cultural and heritage policy. In this article, we explore the construction of this social dimension and advance the concept of 'social Europe' by exploring its cultural aspect based on our analysis of a recent EU heritage action, the European Heritage Label. In this action, the narrations of the European past and the attempts to foster common cultural heritage in Europe function as building blocks …

Revealing colonial power relations in early childhood policy making: An autoethnographic story on selective evidence

2021

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes uncertainty, instability and glaring inequality that requires urgent global policy decisions. Historically, bureaucrats regard uncertainty as the enemy and look for tested solutions (Stevens, 2011). In contrast, Fielding & Moss (2010) acknowledge an uncertain future and encourage shifting policy making towards the search for possibilities instead of replicating singular solutions. Escobar (2020) advocates for pluriversal politics, with many possibilities created through collective decision-making by autonomous interlinked networks. In this paper, I combine autoethnography with policy analysis drawing on my own experience in South African early childhood pol…