SEARCH RESULTS

Safeguarding water resources has become a strategic need to maintain the viability of agricultural operations, which are significantly reliant on water accessibility. The urgency of this requirement is amplified by the manifest effects of climate change, necessitating the implementation of specific solutions to improve irrigation system efficiency and foster sustainable use of water resources.
This research seeks to conduct an ex-post analysis of irrigation investments in the Po River Basin District, Italy’s most important agricultural area and one of the most irrigated in Europe, examining their sustainability by developing indicators that include technical, environmental, and social dimensions. The analysis examines interventions devised and executed by land reclamation and irrigation consortia, primarily targeting irrigation – including multipurpose reservoirs – as well as those directed towards environmental protection and the preservation of land and agricultural productivity amid instability.
Preliminary findings underscore the role of both current and prospective investments in enhancing the overall efficiency of the region. The research offers valuable insights for policymakers, affirming the critical importance of investments in irrigation infrastructure for enhancing the resilience and longterm sustainability of agriculture and the national water system.

This paper examines the importance of making time for what Hannah Arendt calls the ‘space of appearance’ to feminist solidarity, considering shared time and space as a scene through which a recognition-based politics of care might flourish. As a way into contributing to discussions about the feminist struggle for time and space it draws from Arendt’s distinction between work and labour, and feminist readings of it, to consider the importance of workability to building and sustaining feminist solidarity. It begins by considering the importance of the ‘space of appearance’ to Arendt’s thinking, before sharing some personal reflections on the challenges of making time and space for co-appearance and connection. It then examines the ontological, ethical and political underpinnings of making time and space from a feminist perspective, drawing from Judith Butlers’ reading of Arendt in their writing on how vulnerability and/as resistance is materialized in a politics of assembly. Finally, it explores the importance of recognition of our mutual but socially situated interdependence to the workable lives necessary to realizing feminist solidarity, and a politics of care.

Digitalisation is having a profound impact on the relationship between time and planning. The temporalities of planning’s bureaucratic infrastructure is being transformed through its digitalisation, introducing machine and network time and reshaping the relations between past, present and future. In turn, the temporalities of digital infrastructure has led to re-infrastructuring of planning’s temporalities, introducing a new timescape wherein the pace, tempo, timings, time patterns and temporal modalities of planning practice have been reconfigured. Yet, despite the profound effect of digitalisation on temporal relations, clock time remains important in the organisation and work of planning given the centrality of time rules and timetables, and this will continue to be the case. Using a case study of the development and control function of planning in Ireland, this paper examines temporalities of planning’s digital infrastructures and the digital infrastructuring of planning’s temporalities, illustrating the ways in which the temporal organisation and practices of planning work are being re-cast.

Our world of work and consumption is increasingly centered on a key expectation: the fluidity of workers’ and customers’ experiences. Rhythms, interruptions, and incompleteness are at the heart of contemporary forms of organization that cultivate impatience. Fundamentally, we can no longer support moments of waiting. And our digital practices epitomize this trend, especially with the continuous and addictive scrolling of digital media or the prompting of generative AI. Using the vocabulary, metaphors, and wisdom of the tale Thousands and One Nights, I analyze this process and its possible alternatives for workers and consumers. I sketch what might be seen as a negative ontology of time that might be a promising avenue for research in organization studies.

Volunteering represents a crucial form of social participation. In addition to traditional modalities, more flexible forms - such as episodic and digital volunteering - are increasingly emerging, expanding opportunities for engagement and reshaping both the perceived meaning and social impact of volunteer activities. This qualitative research, grounded in nine focus groups comprising a total of 67 volunteers, undertakes an analysis of the experiences of individuals engaged in the three forms of volunteering. While common elements emerge, significant differences are also apparent. Traditional volunteers tend to perceive themselves as akin to activists, yet they often experience dissatisfaction with institutional structures. Episodic volunteers are primarily motivated by the variety of tasks and the flexibility with which they can manage their engagement, valuing a sense of autonomy. Digital volunteers, who are also self-managed, express a strong awareness of their global impact, yet frequently report a lack of recognition. The landscape of volunteering is undergoing a period of transformation, and while there remains a degree of commonality among the various forms of volunteering, it is imperative for volunteer services to also reflect on these distinctions. This reflection is necessary to establish suitable recruitment and retention strategies for the domain of social participation.

The research aims to investigate the co-constructed social representations of political participation that circulate among different groups of young Italian and Colombian university students and to verify whether there are correlations between social representations, political participatory behaviour, perceived anomie and self-efficacy. Using a semi-structured questionnaire, it was possible to reach a total sample of 327 students from Naples and 370 students from Bogotá, divided into three subgroups based on “political orientation”: young people on the right, young people on the left, and young people who are not affiliated with any political party. The internal structure of social representations was reconstructed using the hierarchical evocation technique. The content of the representations studied was operationalised using specific psychometric scales. Right-wing young people exhibit a very traditional view of political participation. Italian young people tend to emphasise the positive aspects of participation, whereas Colombian young people associate it with a negative connotation. Left-wing young people, both Neapolitan and Bogotano, are very active in demonstrations and actions aimed at change: the latter also emphasise their ability to influence the socio-political fabric. Young people who claim not to identify with any political party or faction have a strong distrust of their respective state institutions, as well as traditional representative bodies. The students involved in the study, regardless of their nationality and political orientation, showed great interest in participating. The results obtained so far provide important insights into how young people participate in politics and the meanings they attribute to it.

Starting from a project aimed at developing a network among various social actors in order to build an “Educating Community”, this paper focuses on the evaluation process, with particular attention to one of the many target groups involved: adolescents. Participants completed a questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of the project, aimed to assess residential attachment, sense of community, and psychosocial and emotional well-being (n = 326, 50.6% of whom belonged to the experimental group). The data collected at the end of the project did not show any increase in the dimensions investigated. Based on this unexpected result, the paper offers a reflection on the methodological and psychosocial factors that may explain this outcome.

Contemporary digital feminist activism is often embodied and represented through individual influencer accounts, which enable a form of parasocial feminism, likely being effective due to parasocial mechanisms and their significance for the social self. This study explores the influence and meaning of parasocial feminism for followers. To this end, 46 narratives by social media followers of an influencer who is a German artist and practices a distinct form of parasocial feminism known as #volanismus (“#volanism”), addressing misogyny, inequality and suppression through drawings and performance art in the form of online responses to hateful social media comments. Applying a psychoanalytic paradigm, we investigate how content and parasocial community dynamics are subjectively experienced through explicit and latent layers of meaning. The findings reveal how parasocial feminism bears significant meaning on the subjective level for the self, but also in the form of practical relevance, shaping everyday life and social and relational dynamics (e.g., divorce, having another child, transforming sexual scripts). We discuss these findings in terms of resistance and group dynamics, with a particular focus on how social mechanisms are transformed under spreading parasociality, with social media communities becoming a key part of the social self and contemporary social organizing. We also highlight limitations, noting that online activism perpetuates an individualizing logic within contemporary liberal feminism and platform capitalism.

Modern volunteerism has undergone a broad transformation, which has made episodic and online forms stem. This study investigates (a) how traditional, episodic, and online volunteering affect volunteers’ local community experiences – meant as Sense of Community (SoC), Sense of Re-sponsible Togetherness (SoRT), and social generativity – and (b) the moderating role of volunteering-related ambivalence in this. The results show that only traditional volunteering has a positive impact on SoC, while online volunteering harms social generativity. Ambivalence plays a complex role: it weakens the positive impact of traditional volunteerism on SoC, yet it reverses and strengthens the effect on social generativity when it comes to online one-making it positive. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

This article explores the intertwining of time, space, and digital technology within high educational and research organisations, with a focus on early-career researchers. Using a theoretical framework situated at the intersection of the sociology of time and science and technology studies (STS), it draws on the concepts of epistemic living spaces (Felt, 2009) and timescapes (Adam, 1998) to analyse the spatiotemporal structures shaping researchers’ social action. Empirical evidence comes from mentoring programmes and the use of two ad hoc methodological tools—Temporal Activity Diaries and Logbooks—designed to investigate temporalities in academic careers. The analysis reveals that early-career researchers inhabit fragmented and asynchronous epistemic living time spaces, characterised by multiple time regimes and rhythms, with differentiated effects across gender and career cohort. The paper introduces the concept of digital timescapes to examine how temporalities shaped by digital infrastructures contribute to new organisational models of research work and reflect broader transformations in the governance of science. Finally, it identifies practices of temporal resistance—including reframing, care, and solidarity—through which researchers attempt to balance asynchronies and negotiate the crooked time-spaces of research.

Remote work as telework (salaried employment performed outside company premises via digital technologies), became central during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper presents an interpretative analysis based on Le télétravail, la COVID et la numérisation, a study conducted in France (2023-2024). Examining remote work’s organizational transformations in post-pandemic France and Italy through a critical socio-organizational lens, it draws on qualitative field research with interviews in Paris, Toulouse, Milan, and Messina. The study explores three key dimensions: the reorganization of workplaces, as remote work reshapes the relationship between living and working spaces; the transformation of temporal dynamics, where increased flexibility disrupts traditional work-life rhythms; the emotional economy between new pluralities and the desire for autonomy, revealing the practices workers adopt to carve out autonomy, highlighting shifting organizational boundaries. Research findings show that remote work embodies the ambivalence of contemporary capitalism, balancing neoliberal constraints and emancipatory potentials. Its future depends on how individuals, organizations, and institutions negotiate autonomy, control, and social justice. The challenge is to transform it from an isolating mechanism into a tool for resilient communities. As Lefebvre suggests, we must “reinvent everyday space” to create a future where work and life coexist as allies, not adversaries.

In questo articolo gli autori si propongono di condividere l'esperienza che hanno vissuto con Adriana (“Nana”) Schnake, una persona che ha segnato e continua a influenzare le loro vite, sia come terapeuta che come formatrice, generando in loro l'atteggiamento fenomenologico, considerato il cuore di questa tradizione terapeutica. È proprio basandosi su questa esperienza che gli autori articolano una narrazione su questa donna straordinaria, che dal sud del mondo ha saputo agire raggiungendo la profondità dell'esperienza umana. Si propone uno sguardo partendo dal suo essere-nel-mondo, la sua radicalità come terapeuta, la fiducia nel campo e lo sviluppo del suo approccio gestaltico-esistenziale. Infine, si mette in evidenza il suo particolare approccio olistico alla salute e alla malattia. Gli autori non hanno la pretesa di offrire uno sguardo obiettivo sulla sua eredità, né di coprire tutte le sue sfaccettature e l'ampiezza dei suoi contributi; il tentativo è piuttosto quello di condividere un racconto che contribuisca e possa essere di stimolo affinché si continui ad esplorare l’originalità di questa psicoterapia della Gestalt situata al sud del mondo. L'articolo è stato scritto a pochi chilometri da dove Nana ha vissuto e fondato il suo centro Anchimalén, sull'Isola di Chiloé.

Il testo a cura di Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, Pietro Andrea Cavaleri, Mattia Romano e Giacomo Bisonti, propone una riflessione sulla psicoterapia in tempi di guerra, partendo dalle esperienze dirette di professionisti e pazienti coinvolti nei conflitti recenti, in particolare in Ucraina. La cornice teorica e clinica della psicoterapia della Gestalt si confronta con l’urgenza della storia, interrogandosi sul ruolo sociale e politico della cura in condizioni estreme. Il libro offre una lettura etica e necessaria, che invita a non voltarsi altrove.

L’articolo presenta una rielaborazione dell’intervista al dott. Riccardo Zerbetto, condotta nel gennaio 2025 nell’ambito del ciclo “La SIPG racconta: la storia della psicoterapia della Gestalt italiana”. La testimonianza offre un contributo significativo alla ricostruzione delle origini e degli sviluppi della psicoterapia della Gestalt nel contesto italiano, delineando il ruolo pionieristico di Zerbetto nella diffusione dell’approccio “della West Coast” e nella sua applicazione ai contesti delle dipendenze e della salute pubblica.

Attraverso un percorso che intreccia esperienza clinica, impegno sociale e riflessione epistemologica, emergono i fondamenti di una prospettiva gestaltica intesa come pratica umanistica, fenomenologica ed esistenziale, in dialogo con le trasformazioni culturali e scientifiche contemporanee.

L’intervista approfondisce inoltre le più recenti direzioni di ricerca dell’autore, che includono il confronto tra psicoterapia e fisica quantistica, l’esplorazione del nesso tra mito e psiche e la valorizzazione della dimensione poetica come via di conoscenza e di cura.

Nel suo insieme, il testo propone una visione della Gestalt therapy come approccio aperto e integrativo, capace di coniugare profondità simbolica e vitalità esperienziale, in una prospettiva che Zerbetto stesso definisce di “Gestalt archetipica”.