Vita e Pensiero

Islam in Italy is highly discussed but not significantly institutionalized. Polemics about its presence (and anti-multiculturalism in general) have often preceded any real multicultural politics, and the recognition of religious minorities arrived with immigration, such as Islam. The Covid pandemics has made visible one of the aspects of the necessary de facto acknowledgement of the presence of Islam: the problem of Muslim cemeteries, up to that moment avoided or postponed as much as possible by local municipalities, with few exceptions...

The case study examined in this contribution is that of Italian communities in Belgium, where associations played a fundamental role for Italian citizens who emigrated after World War II but also for their descendants. Associationism represents a very interesting research field, if we choose to look at migrants as active subjects, who do not simply adapt to the social context of the territories they live in but rather tend to transform it...

The article addresses the current transformations of the Civil Service for young people promoted by the Italian state. It seeks to understand whether and how the digitalisation processes are changing the forms of civic engagement. The analysis highlights two contrasting trends. At the level of governance of the system, the digital platforms activated have centralized and made procedures more efficient without creating new opportunities for relations and sharing informations between actors...

Based on the cross-national survey part of the so called Peoples’ Internet (PIN) Project, the article1 analyzes social media uses in three different world regions: Europe, US, and China. Within the tradition of the studies on the social uses of the media, the article describes different kinds of social media uses, focusing on different factors that contribute to shape them in a more or less private or public way...

The Covid-19 pandemic forced the Cultural and Creative Industries to face the shift into the digital sphere. While so far research observed how Covid-19 accelerated the process, on the basis of interviews with seventeen CCIs in Bologna, this contribution deepens how digitalization impacts the reorganization of work and audiences’ engagement, and what function digital technologies have for CCIs’ innovation...

Secondo fascicolo del 2023

Violence is not only an individual pulsion but it is a social construction, a language bonded in every culture: it can be an adaptive response to a specific stimulus or stress. It is intrinsic in social systems that, in order to maintain their own identity and coherence and to self-perpetuate, they generate aggressive responses when the changes that involve them turn out to be too sudden or radical. Various contributions debated the decline of violence...

Ethical issues innervate the entire research process and, consequently, they have implications for the whole research’s methodological framework itself. In Italy, Social Work research has a relatively recent history. It is therefore important that the ethical issue is not left behind in the process of focusing and developing research methods appropriate to social work. In this article, some basic historical references for social work research are proposed and the main formal rules about it are summarized...