Narratives from North and South Europe

Narratives from North and South Europe
Helsinki-Florence

Friday 22 December 2017

The Challenge of a Global Sociological Imagination (Helsinki, April 19-20, 2018)

Erdapfel, Martin Behaim (1490-1492)
Oldest surviving terrestrial globe
With Peter Holley and Sanna Saksela-Bergholm  we are organizing  the Mid-term Conference of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network 15: Global, Transnational & Cosmopolitan Sociology. The conference is supported by the European Sociological Association (ESA), the Swedish School of Social Science, the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN), the University of Helsinki’s Mi­gra­tionand Di­a­spora Stud­ies Research Group, and the  European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-CurieActions.
Read more HERE.
The conference clearly draws on Charles Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1959) and his challenge to a structural functionalist approach for an integrated study of self and society, history and biography: “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” (3) The sociological imagination is not a theoretical or a conceptual tool strictu sensu. It is a task and a promise: “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.” (6)
This “quality of mind” sustains the interpretation of peoples’ lives within the broader social and historical context. Developing this quality, both the social scientist and the ordinary person can partially evade their private life “traps” by connecting “personal troubles” to “public issues”.
Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.” (3)
“Troubles” are private matters and mirror subjective challenges. “Issues” represent problems that transcend the private sphere of individuals, hence they are “public matter(s)” and deserve sociological consideration.
Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction… Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. (3-4, emphasis mine)
In times of “fake news” and pretentious “fact checkers”, Mills’ lesson comes in handy: people do not need more information in the “Age of Fact”. It is not a question of bad information or good information filtered by self-styled guardians of the news inhabiting a temple of knowledge. In actual fact and as a matter of fact, in the Age of Fact information dominates individuals’ attention and “overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it”. (5) People need to interpret and hence have a better grasp of what is going on in the world and what is happening in their private lives. Mills is calling for a crucial “quality of mind” to comprehend “the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world”. (4)
Thus, the sociological imagination – defined by Mills as a form of self-consciousness – refers to the ability to see beyond isolated subjective experiences and understand them in connection with the wider social themes impinging on them. According to Mills, the aptitude to see connections and patterns is the essence of sociological talent tout court.
The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals… It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self and to see the relations between the two (5 and 7).
Social analysts who have been “imaginatively aware” of the task-promise of their study, have always asked three kinds of questions: (1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? (2) Where does this society stand in human history? And the third question, that I would like to cite in full, is:
What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of “human nature” are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for “human nature” of each and every feature of the society we are examining? (7) 
In a certain sense, the sociological imagination can, as a whole, be considered as the pursuit of a humanist sociology. And it is probably this kind of imagination that could help the researcher to overcome the challenges of a global world.
Mills introduces the expression “abstracted empiricism” (Chapter 3): the work of sociologists who equate empiricism with science and make a fetish of quantitative research techniques. In a word, data and statistical analyses are not sufficient for an appropriate sociological interpretation. Without theoretical categories and comparative historical analyses, the data is meaningless.
Regarding theories, Mills proposes another expression, “grand theory” (Chapter 2): the sociological practice of coming up with very abstract theorizing, which is obfuscating the fruitful interpretation of the social world. There is a famous passage (Appendix: “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”) in which Wright Mills summarises the basic practice underlying (good) sociological research.
Be a good craftsman: Avoid any rigid set of procedures. Above all, seek to develop and to use the sociological imagination. Avoid the fetishism of method and technique. Urge the rehabilitation of the unpretentious intellectual craftsman, and try to become such a craftsman yourself. Let every man be his own methodologist; let every man be his own theorist; let theory and method again become part of the practice of a craft. (224)

Friday 17 November 2017

Double Boundary and Cosmopolitan Experience in Europe

Double Boundary and Cosmopolitan Experience in Europe aims to open up the debate about national, European and cosmopolitan identity through an interpretation of Simmel’s double boundary dialectic: human beings are boundaries and only those who stand outside their boundaries can see them as such. One difficulty with defining oneself as European stems from what could be called the “double Other” (intra- and extra-European) diachronic recognition process. Exploring the possible/impossible cosmopolitan meta-synthesis can identify certain traits of the cosmopolitan experience in Europe. (Keywords: Boundary, Simmel, Europe, Cosmopolitan, Culture, Trans-cultural, Trans-social).
The chapter is part of the book Globalization, Supranational Dynamics and Local Experiences, edited by Marco Caselli and Guia Gilardoni – book series “Europe in a Global Context” (Palgrave Macmillan). This edited collection focuses on concepts of globalization, glocalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. The contributions provide evidence of how in practice, global dynamics and individual lives are interrelated. It presents theoretical reflections on how the local, the transnational and global dimensions of social life are entwined and construct the meaning of one another, and offers everyday examples of how individuals and organizations try to answer global challenges in local contexts. The book closely focuses on migration processes, as one of the main phenomena allowing a high number of people from contemporary society to directly experience supranational dynamics, either as migrants or inhabitants of the places where migrants pass through or settle down. Globalization, Supranational Dynamics and Local Experiences will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, migration studies and global studies. You can check a preview of the book here.

Birindelli P. (2017) Double Boundary and Cosmopolitan Experience in Europe. In Caselli M., Gilardoni G. (eds.) Globalization, Supranational Dynamics and Local Experiences. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 127-148.

Saturday 30 September 2017

International Students’ Self-Identity Abroad

I was invited to the 2017 European Researchers’ Night, funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (European Commission’s Horizon 2020). The event took place at the “Think Corner” (University of Helsinki). You can watch the Unitube video (I was the first one of the evening). Let me share the gist of the talk. It’s a preliminary interpretative attempt. 
I believe the decision to go abroad is influenced by a “push-pull” factor: something is attracting and something is pushing away from “home”. One of the activating question for the audience was: “Nobody knows you in the host country: new colleagues at work, new friends, new sentimental relationship. How do you present yourself?”. A) Exactly in the same old way: I want to be 110% who I am back at home. B) I change something: I do not want to be exactly the same person. C) I change everything: I want to be a totally different person. 
Once abroad, the Self is separated from the confirming and confining matrix of “home”, it is no longer an emplaced self. In this situation the “actor” is forced and allowed at the same time to present him/herself in a slightly different way. It’s a new stage with a different underpinning story: you cannot play exactly by the same old script. At the same time the young traveller is not socialized to a leading narrative of/for Finland. Thus, in Helsinki you have both the freedom and the possibility (because it’s a well-ordered and functional society) to express yourself. Finland is a mysterious place where you can partially build a new Self-image and play it on the city everyday life stage. A Nordic SelfOf course, I need to think more about this idea.

Friday 29 September 2017

Methodological and Theoretical Pluralism

Before and after the ESA conference in Athens I presented preliminary findings in two seminars:
– Travel and Cultural Experience: Narratives from North and South Europe, University of Helsinki, Department of Social Research, 23/08/2017.
– From the Grand Tour to the Study Tour: International Students’ Narratives. TCuPS (University of Tampere Research Group for Cultural and Political Sociology), 19/09/2017.
In both occasions I gave an overview of the research path and shared possible theoretical interpretations. I received very interesting and conflicting feedbacks. My guess is that the contrast  stems from  different approaches or paradigms.
A plurality of paradigms has always occupied the field of social science, and at times one paradigm partially prevailed others. When the heuristic potential of a paradigm seemed to supersede others, we assisted to “turns,” whether linguistic, cultural, narrative, etc. Are we facing another turn in the field of social sciences? Alternatively, is it time for the end of all “turns”? Wouldn’t it be more useful, and probably scientifically adequate, to contemplate a pluralism of paradigms? We can take into consideration different objections to theoretical pluralism. The strongest one is “monism”.  The monist objection in its rough version could be so summarized: one of the contending positions is valid and all the rest are wrong, misleading, or unimportant. In a more sophisticated way: alternative approaches are historically valid but currently outmoded, as necessary but transient stages in the evolution of current true belief, or as partially valid positions which need to be incorporated in a more embracing theoretical synthesis. The heart of methodological and theoretical pluralism is instead the belief that two or more divergent positions may be entirely acceptable. Georg Simmel created the first major body of argumentation to support theoretical pluralism in the social sciences. The essence of Simmel’s metatheory consists in his refusal of a definitive synthesis.
“There can be no unification based on objective content, but only one achieved by a subject who can regard both positions. By sensing the reverberations of spiritual existence in the distance opened up by these opposites, the soul grows, despite, indeed, because of, the fact that it does not decide in favor of one of the parties” (Simmel, 1907/1991, 181).

Simmel, G.  (1907/1991) Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Thursday 28 September 2017

Italian President Sergio Mattarella visits Finland


Italian President Sergio Mattarella (photo by Francesco Ammendola)
The President of the Italian Republic Sergio Mattarella was in Helsinki for a three-day official state visit to Finland. On Tuesday, September 26, I was invited by the Italian Ambassador Gabriele Altana and Mrs Alessandra Magalotti to a reception hosted at  the official residence of the Italian Ambassador. Here, as a representative of the Italian community in Finland, I had the great honour to meet our President Sergio Mattarella
The state visit was hosted by Sauli Niinistö, President of the Republic of Finland. The agenda included a bilateral discussion between the presidents. Sergio Mattarella expressed his pleasure of making a state visit to Finland when the country is celebrating its 100 years of independence. Themes of the discussion included migration, security policies and climate issues.
Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Ambassador Gabriele Altana
Our President spoke about the broad convergence of Finland and Italy on global issues and highlighted the longstanding cultural relations between the two countries, which constitute a bond of deep friendship between Finnish and Italian people. You can find here the video. During his visit, President Mattarella met also the Speaker of the Finnish Parliament Maria Lohela and Prime Minister Juha Sipilä. Themes of the meetings included political and economic relations between Finland and Italy and other current international questions. 

Monday 28 August 2017

International Students’ Narratives: Cosmopolitan Rites without a Story

International Students’ Narratives: Cosmopolitan Rites without a Story
Pierluca Birindelli
Research Network: Global, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Sociology
Abstract
Studying abroad is a growing and institutionalized practice. To find out what young people are really getting out of it we need to hear their stories and explore the implications of the educational travel within the broader context of their lives.
This paper presents preliminary findings about the significance attributed by international master students in Helsinki and in Florence to their educational, cultural and overall life experience abroad. Analysis of 50 autoethnographical essays reveals that most of the subjects had no previous familiarisation with or exposure to clear-cut narratives about the destination country and city.
We can indeed find a series of related images, but not sufficient to constitute a leading narrative for their life experiences in North or South Europe. The trace of a well-defined script derived from a structured story, such as a book or a movie, is absent. It is instead possible to catch a glimpse of a vague cosmopolitan narrative. This story, constructed on a global scale by different actors and institutions, is partially disconnected from the society and culture of the countries of destination or provenance.
The story upholds the validity of studying abroad for both instrumental and expressive reasons. And the practice seems to constitute a liminal and transitional space-time: an institutionalized rite of passage towards adulthood and global citizenship. It’s an undefined story without exemplary characters, so it’s up to the individual student to find heroes and villains along the way to construct his or her idea of who is a good citizen of the world.
Key words: international students, cultural experience, narratives, cosmopolitan, north Europe, south Europe

Sunday 27 August 2017

San Frediano and the Worth Canon

Porta San Frediano, Firenze
San Frediano and the Worth Canon
Pierluca Birindelli

Last week many international newspapers and almost all the major Italian ones published the following “news”: San Frediano (Firenze) is the “coolest” neighbourhood of the world. Who said that? Lonely Planet: 10of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods to visit right now”. And who said that to the Lonely Planet? Georgette Jupe. Period.
Georgette Jupe keeps a blog with a Vespa as a logo: “Girl in Florence”.  In a certain sense, a Vespa must be in the Italian portrait, see the post “There Must be a Vespa” in my personal blog.  “Vespa” is indeed a very dear cultural object for the Italians. But discussing the differences between local and global meanings would take us too far. Here I would like to touch just one point about touristic guides: the “worth canon.”
The social discourse clearly pre- and per-forms an attitude towards the construction of the experience agenda. We can detect a travelling criterion moulded on the canon of “worthiness.” Roland Barthes described the Blu-Hachette guides (comparable to today’s Lonely Planet) as fetish objects of contemporary tourism. The tourist is led by the guide to places where it is “worth going.” The “worth” canon, according to Barthes, makes all trips, at least structurally, standardised.
Still following Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, “identification” is one of the key figures of the rhetoric of myth regarding other people and cultures. The identification process reveals the inability to imagine the Other; in the experience of confrontation otherness is thus reduced to sameness. In short: the foreigner projects his/her images (acquired through the media and the ongoing social discourse) on the other. The recognition dialectic is therefore blocked, crystallized around a number of stereotypes. Sometimes, when the Other cannot (because the vividness of the reality is enormously incoherent with the myth) or refuses to be reduced, a rhetorical figure comes to the aid in such an emergency: exoticism ‒ “The Other becomes a pure object, a spectacle, a clown” (Barthes, 1972 [1957]: 152). 


References
Barthes, R. (1972 [1957]) Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.

Saturday 5 August 2017

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow of the Week #MSCA: Pierluca Birindelli

I was nominated Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow of the Week: cute!
Birindelli is a cultural sociologist from Italy currently based at the University of Helsinki (Finland), Department of Social Research. His project' abbreviated YouthCult, presents a comparative study (Helsinki and Florence) to investigate the meanings given by selected international students to their educational, cultural and overall life experience abroad. The preliminary analysis of international students’ narratives has shown the importance of food in their cultural experience abroad. Pierluca has already participated in the European Researchers’ Night at the Finnish Science Centre Heureka. This is his insight as an MSCA fellow:
“The programme is structured to give constant backup, so I could truly focus on the research project and grow as a scholar tout court. I would say that MSCA fellowship has a constructive effect even early on. From the very first minute you receive such recognition, you instantly feel more positive and encouraged to pursue your goals”.
Blog of the research project: http://culturalexperienceabroad.blogspot.com

Saturday 15 July 2017

The Art of Eating and Being Together

The Art of Eating and Being Together
Pierluca Birindelli

US sociologist Howard Becker coined the expression Art Worlds: “The network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produce(s) the kind of art works that art world is noted for” (Becker 1982, X). This tautological definition and systemic approach, apparently trivial, has interesting consequences summarized by the statement, “A work of art is what people say it is”. Individuals and institutions have the power to steer popular opinion on the aesthetic value of an art work. The same, as we will see, goes for taste and food consumption.
Art worlds and art markets follow opaque and evanescent rules, often linked to the preferences and idiosyncrasies of a few opinion leaders. They orient taste and define what is valuable in aesthetic terms, therefore even in monetary terms. This top-down model will endure over time, but it is showing its limits, especially in financial terms. This sort of oligopoly leads to a very limited use of the art market’s potential.
Concerning food production and consumption, the discourse, declined in a different way, does not change much. Even in this field the game is about orienting or re-orienting consumers’ practices and, following the French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1979), practices of “distinction.” People’s sense of identity can be reinforced, and sometimes shaped, through the consumption of a product. This is the case for the “veg-veg” (vegetarians and vegans) culture, but the dynamic consumption-identity can also be seen at work in diet regimes clearly linked to a specific idea of ​​the aesthetic beauty of the body. If scientific criteria to define an art work are opaque, in the field of nutrition “science” comes into play in a strong and pervasive manner. Nutrition means health; it means drugs or herbal extracts; it means wellness. However, a scientific criterion is often bent in one direction or another, and it is frequently supplanted by another based on new scientific discoveries. Years ago I was put on a diet to manage my cholesterol levels, and the well-paid nutritionist told me: “Egg is a poison for you.” I recently discovered that the new nutritionist mantra is “an egg a day keeps the doctor away.”
Scientific fields are not immune to the struggle for power and money. And the “scientific” can become a means to launch a product or a long-term consumption trend. “Science”, then, plays a rhetorical function within the marketing discourse. The authority of science derives from scientists’ ability to provide unbiased and trustworthy knowledge. This is the “standard view of science” (Bijker 2001): the public and popular discourse considers science as universal, disinterested and value-free.
Michel Foucault, among others, instead tells us how scientific knowledge cannot be considered objective by definition; it can indeed become instrumental to the advancement of particular interests of certain social groups. More precisely, Foucault pointed out how categories of thought initiated by scientific discourse are able to shape the government of people’s lives and individuals’ understanding of themselves (Foucault 1980).
Emile Durkheim prefigured the relationship of authority-opinion in the way we contemplate science. He brought to our attention how science is often considered the antagonist of opinion, whose errors it combats and rectifies. But science “cannot succeed in this task if it does not have sufficient authority, and it can obtain this authority only from opinion itself. If a people did not have faith in science, all the scientific demonstrations in the world would be without any influence whatsoever over their mind.” (Durkheim 2008/1912, 208)
Getting back to the fields of art and nutrition, we can identify shared mechanisms regulating both fields. By using a simple formal abstraction, we can recognize the opaque blend of scientific and aesthetic judgement as a common governing criterion, which contributes to defining a common battlefield of trends, fashions and therefore wealth.
The distinction practices wind through what is valuable, in aesthetic and scientific terms, and what is valueless and in a certain sense false or sugar-coated. Let’s consider the strategic distinction operated within the tourism industry between travellers and tourists. Here the declared goal is to sell an authentic experience to the tourist – MacCannel (1973) calls it “Staged Authenticity” – be it food or art, so as to make the tourist feel like a traveller, a connoisseur: a person who, precisely, has knowledge, experience and taste in a particular field. One result of such a dynamic in a culturally globalized world is that people feel more cosmopolitan and less provincial. This apparently superficial and trivial identity attribute is pursued tenaciously by both tourists who want to be travellers and travellers who do not want to be tourists.
The social mechanisms regulating distinction practices generate wealth. The key criteria regulating the distinction are cultural, therefore constructed, and embody strong symbolic meanings. The start-up “CarneItaliana” moves within such a field of globally conceived cultural experience. Among other initiatives, it aims to realise the Study Centre “Cultural Identity and Consumption”. This gives the overall entrepreneurial project a far-reaching character, thanks to the monitoring of food production, distribution and consumption trends in Italy, in Europe and in the world.
The study centre will produce scientifically rigorous knowledge. Good knowledge promotes good individual choices (or at least more informed ones) and good economic entrepreneurship, for those who are eager to pursue it. Knowledge, however, cannot be limited to data collection. What is necessary is the multidisciplinary in-depth interpretation of data, aiming to construct theoretical propositions. I will lend a hand to “CarneItaliana” in this aspect.
For a critical approach to meat production and consumption, as well as a deeper understanding of the vegetarian or vegan culture, we need to extend the sociological examination to the interpretation of individual and collective identities. The theme “meat production-consumption” can be analysed under a plurality of viewpoints. Besides the distinction practices mentioned above, we can move in other directions. We can, for instance, take into account the late Zygmunt Bauman’s insights.
Bauman (2007) invites us to observe how the consumer society favours the disruption of group ties. He sees consumption, even in the company of others, as a solitary activity; he even goes so far as to deem it the archetype of solitude. The consumer society disintegrates traditional ties and promotes ephemeral ties, associated with the temporal and spatial limits of consumption activities. If we read Bauman carefully, we discover the importance given to the link between production and consumption.
The distinctive feature of “home”, represented by the family sitting at the dinner table, is neither “eat and go” practice nor a contrived display of ​​knowledge about wine. The set table is the final distributive stage of a production process that begins in the kitchen, or even in the workshop or on the family plot of land. Within a traditional society, what unites the family is, in fact, the collaboration of each member in the overall production process, not just the enjoyment of its fruits (Bauman 2007).
This model may be unrepeatable, unique, or just a distinctive practice for a few (un)sustainable rich freaks. Yet we can imagine other production-consumption practices that might help to support the creation of deeper human bonds by transcending the act of mere consumption. Knowing what we eat, its origin, and the history of those who breed and deliver it to our table, might be a viable way to move forward from the disruptive effects of a consumer culture. The foundation of cultures such as vegetarian and vegan, but also the potential “grass-fed meat” culture, can strengthen ties and solidarities going beyond the consumption of a good dish and all the Master Chef fluff that goes with it.
Bauman tells us that fast food and TV Dinners render family meals obsolete, and that they symbolically indicate the insignificance of the human bonds of the consumer society. However, if the image of the traditional home seems to vanish or be severely compromised in our liquid times, nothing prevents us from imagining new homes.
Certainly, to gather around our own totems, and to despise others’ totems, does not seem the best way to move along. Discussion helps. That’s what we did in the debate “A qualcuno piace carne” (Some Like Meat). I introduced it and partially tried to gear it according to what I have written so far. The debate, which was not intended to be “academic” in the narrow sense of the word, was lively, polite and constructive. It certainly also portrayed the battlefield Omnivores vs. Veg-Veg (Vegan/Vegetarian). The two tribes hold on to their totems, supported (and influenced) by the interpenetration of old and new media logics. The event had an impressive audience on Facebook Live: 65,400 people were reached, 8,900 interacted with the post, 19,000 watched the debate from start to finish, 867 comments were made and the event was shared 76 times.
  During the discussion, the two journalists and several people attending the event kept their feet in two shoes. The Facebook Live “like” and “angry face” dialectic, along with colourful comments, entered and partially affected the real-life discussion taking place in the physical room hosting the debate – and the other way around. It was a sort of “Live-Live” discussion, in which it was hard to distinguish between frontage, backstage and audience. Sometimes it looked like a house of mirrors. I realized that the day after, watching the video with analytic attention. Apparently, I was one of the few monotasking actors performing in just one scene, right there where I was with my body. We should probably change the title of the study center and add the word “media” somewhere.

References
Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity.
Becker, H.S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bijker, W.E. (2001) “Understanding Technological Culture Through a Constructivist View of Science, Technology, and Society” Visions of STS:19-34.
Bourdieu, P. (1984/1979) Distinction. Harvard University Press.
Durkheim, E. (2008/1912) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
Foucault, M. (1980) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. An introduction. New York: Vintage Books.
MacCannell, D. (1973) “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist SettingsAmerican Journal of Sociology: 589-603.





Monday 8 May 2017

The EU and Global Challenges: Twenty-eight Ideas from the Erasmus Generation

I took part to the International Conference “The EU and Global Challenges: Twenty-eight Ideas from the Erasmus Generation”, School of Political Science “Cesare Alfieri” and Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, University of Florence (program). The conference was scheduled during the 2017 Festival of Europe which takes place in Florence every two years and runs for a week.


The purpose of the conference – one-of-a-kind – was to allow a group of students coming from all over Europe (two from each member country) to present specific proposals and discuss their views on the European integration process and its current challenges with representatives of EU institutions.
The 28 teams were asked to write a position paper on the issues that are – in their view – a priority for revitalizing the European integration process. 
As an expert appointed by the local scientific committee, I coordinated, with Gemma Scalise, the Session “Shared Values and Rising Nationalism in the EU: A difficult Fit” (Cyprus, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal).
Federica Mogherini

Monday 27 March 2017

L'amateur cosmopolite

I participated to a very interesting international seminar “New Generations and the Reinvention of the Social” (University of Genoa, School of Social Science), organized by Andrea Pirni and Luca Raffini (chair: Mauro Palumbo).  Here I've been one of the discussants to the presentation of the book by Vincenzo Cicchelli and Sylvie Octobre L'amateur cosmopolite. As Cicchelli puts it (2012), an experience abroad might foster an education to alterity, a sort of cosmopolitan socialization or Bildung. He questions whether this praxis is oriented more towards aesthetic, cultural, ethical or political forms of cosmopolitanism. Adopting this clarifying grid, we may affirm that several scholars construct a hierarchical scale where aesthetic orientations constitute the lower and most superficial step for the development of cosmopolitan spirit, and the political orientation represents the highest. This hierarchy within cosmopolitanism’s dimensions (Gemann Molz 2011) opposes an authentic form of cosmopolitan openness to another that is more superficial (Cicchelli, Octobre, & Riegel 2016). Basically, the awareness of different cultures channeled by aesthetic and cultural cosmopolitanism is often considered “superficial and cosmetic” (Sassatelli 2012, 235).
The Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz pointed out the Two Faces of Cosmopolitanism: one more cultural and one more political. The latter, he argued, is “often a cosmopolitanism with a worried face, trying to come to grips with very large problems”, whereas in its cultural dimension may be a cosmopolitanism happily “enjoying new sights, sounds and tastes, new people”: “And in combination, and merging with one another, they may be that thick form of cosmopolitanism, where experience and symbolism can motivate identification and a will to action.” (Hannerz 2005, 204).
Hannerz’s invitation is to pay attention to “on the ground” cosmopolitanism, where people engage in everyday cultural activities (Cicchelli and Octobre 2015). In some liminal public spaces the cosmopolitan “simulacrum” can become a “canopy”. These are everyday life stages that allow people from different backgrounds “to slow down and indulge themselves, observing, pondering, and in effect, doing their own folk ethnography, testing or substantiating stereotypes and prejudices or, rarely, acknowledging something fundamentally new about the other.” (Anderson 2004, 25) These spaces, at home or abroad, can foster “a kind of confidence, and a code of civility”: “Expanding out of the neighborhood to take in more of the world, is not to be underestimated. A kind of modest bottom-up cosmopolitics may at least be a matter of maintaining a certain immunity to extreme antagonisms, of hatred or of fear” (Hannerz 2005, 212, emphasis added).
Hannerz notes that in the decades after the fall of the Berlin wall there has been a renewed interest in cosmopolitanism among social scientists, while headlines and storylines portray new wars, human wrongs, things falling apart. “Yet those may again be the kinds of things that go most readily precisely into headlines and storylines. It may be worth looking more closely for the small signs of banal, or quotidian, or vernacular, or low-intensity cosmopolitanism.” (Hannerz 2005, 27).

References
Anderson, E. (2004) “The Cosmopolitan Canopy” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 595(1): 14-31.
Cicchelli, V.  (2012) L’esprit cosmopolite: Voyages de formation des jeunes en Europe. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.
Cicchelli, V., Octobre, S.  (2015) “Sur le Cosmopolitisme Esthetique des Jeunes” Le Débat 183: 101-9.
Cicchelli, V., Octobre, S., & Riegel, V. (2016) “After the Omnivore, the Cosmopolitan Amateur: Reflections about Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism” Global Studies Journal, 9(1): 55-69.
Gemann Molz, J. (2011) “Cosmopolitanism and Consumption” in M. Rovisco and M. Nowicka (eds.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, 33-52. Farnham: Ashgate
Hannerz, U. (2005) “Two faces of cosmopolitanism: culture and politics” Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 107(3): 199-213.
Sassatelli, M. (2012) “Festivals, Museums, Exhibitions: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in the Cultural Public Sphere” in G. Delanty (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, 232-44. London: Routledge.  

Wednesday 15 February 2017

Omnivores vs. Veg-Veg (Vegetarians/Vegans)


The preliminary analysis of international students’ narratives has shown the importance of food in their cultural experience abroad. Thus, I decided to co-organize (with a start-up on grass-fed cattle, Carne Italiana) introduce and chair the debate Omnivores vs Veg/Veg (Vegetarians, Vegans) A qualcuno piace carne” (Some Like Meat)
The debate starred two popular Italian journalists, Giuseppe Cruciani and  Giulia Innocenzi. The debate had an impressive audience on Facebook. 65,400 people were reached, 8,900 interacted with the post, 19,000 watched the debate from beginning to end, 867 comments were left and the debate was shared 76 times.
Here you can find a short introduction to the debate (in Italian).