Happiness is a right that must be recognized and must be accessible to everyone, because it depends on what social actors are able to do or not do. This seems to distance happiness from the emotional dimension. This paper intends to present data relating to a part of a larger study carried out in 2021. The research investigated the social imagery that revolves around the concept of happiness. The study involved 20 men and 20 women (35-45 years- old) in two web discussions. This paper will try to understand if happiness is an emotion, mood or personality trait and if a gender distinction emerges. The data collected showed that for the study participants, happiness is an emotion. Despite this, a gender distinction is highlighted with respect to the other two images of happiness (mood and personality trait). In the first case, the image of happiness as a state of mind is more common among women. For the men involved in the study, happiness is the result of individual action, it is a characteristic personality trait.
This paper is part of the field of critical consumption studies, sketching a portrait of fair trade consumers in Italy today. The study adopts an original approach from three perspectives: 1) studying consumers within the World Shops, the traditional channels of fair trade consumption; 2) analyzing their actual purchasing practices; 3) considering consumers as historical subjects depth. The research project, which adopts a mixed-methods approach through the use of questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic observations, identifies a typology of COMES consumers. A heterogeneous portrait emerges, where alongside consumers tied to more traditional values, there are others who have just recently approached the World Shops, in a cultural climate more sensitive to environmental sustainability and proximity economy.
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. As an outcome of an empirical research on Muslim in Italy during the pandemics, the paper aims to explore the different attitudes of Muslims families and communities facing the problem of being buried in the municipality they lived in, instead of repatriating the bodies as it was the most common procedure until Covid. The research shows the attempt of Muslims to minimize friction with Italian norms and institutions, through a re-interpretation of the symbolic border between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the idea of purity, contamination and separation.
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. By analysing the content of biographical interviews carried out with children and descendants of Italians who emigrated to the country between 1946 and 1976, this paper investigates the role of Italian associationism precisely in relation to the processes of socialisation and cultural mediation in an intergenerational perspective.
This contribution highlights the care management strategies and resilience of families during the pandemic in reconciling work and childcare through a qualitative study of working parents aimed at investigating in depth the experiences and reconciliation strategies used to cope with the pandemic. The results reveal an ambivalent evaluation of the experience: working from home was an opportunity for growth in the family dimension, in the children’s ability to organize themselves and in their awareness of their parents’ work; nevertheless, the challenges regarding reconciliation were experienced negatively, generating fear, guilt, inadequacy, stress, and fatigue. The study also highlighted, even amidst the many difficulties experienced, the emergence of new resources and skills learned that made it possible to cope with a highly risky situation: resilience, a greater understanding of priorities, a lessening of the sense of control and the acquisition of a more accomplished degree of reflexivity and awareness.
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. Social media practices do not differentiate in a simply dichotomous way, as “private” or “public”; rather, they are gradually articulated in a “scalable sociality” that integrates, in different ways, elements of privateness and publicness. In the definition of such a scale, structural and cultural differences among different world regions and single countries play a role, alongside with variables as socio-demographic features, available capitals, and civic attitudes.
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. Conversely, at the project level, thanks to ICT, young people have experienced new ways of service and distance learning in the pandemic crisis phase. The experimentation of a form of Digital Civil Service has opened up a new front of commitment linked to the digital facilitation and training of citizenship. The study reveals a cultural change of perspective towards more flexible forms of civic engagement that include digital spaces and open up a new front of intervention concerning the promotion of citizens’ digital rights of access and participation.
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