LIBRI DI PIERMARCO AROLDI

Il sociologo statunitense W.A. Corsaro pubblica in lingua italiana la quinta edizione del manuale di Sociologia dell’infanzia, che contiene gli elementi teorici, metodologici e i risultati empirici di quarant’anni di indagine con bambini e ragazzi di diversi Paesi. Un’opera per educatori, maestri e studiosi dell’infanzia che vogliano abbracciare uno sguardo critico sul mutare della vita dei bambini in famiglia, nei contesti urbani e nei servizi per l’infanzia, ma soprattutto che siano disponibili a “guardare il mondo con gli occhi dei bambini”.

The paper proposes a conversational approach to Social Network Sites on the basis of a historical overview on the status of the conversation as a form of sociability. Following the sociological tradition, the conversation may be understood as a special case of act, event or genre of discourse characterized by the principle of cooperation, equal distribution of the right to speak in turns, spontaneity, informality and a non-utilitarian tone. At the same time, this form of sociability reveals to be a dispositif capable of expressing and/or generating a certain social order, closely related to the structure and the ideal representation of the society in which it is acted. The result is an approach to social networks as technological platforms that enable practices of conversation between users, in which interfaces and affordances contribute significantly to shaping such practices; while affirming a (relative) insignificance of the content of the conversation, there is clearly a strong relational dimension that helps to frame the Social Network Sites as practice of togetherness in form of conversation.

Il Rapporto 2007 riprende il tema del futuro della città, avendo come orizzonte i sentieri dello sviluppo urbano e i processi di ridefinizione degli attuali equilibri della metropoli milanese. Vengono indagati aspetti quali: il disegno urbanistico, le politiche abitative e la ristrutturazione delle periferie; i flussi della mobilità e la rete dei trasporti; gli assetti economico-produttivi e il ruolo della comunicazione; i problemi di coesione sociale e la questione della sicurezza.

In the second year, the research on multicultural communication has broadly followed the guidelines established in the first year, while at the same time deepening the scope and widening the focus. As for the first aspect, the researchers have considered, as in the previous year, both life histories and interviews on cultural and media consumption. New subjects have been interviewed, in order to test and enrich the results achieved at the end of the first year of research. As for the second one, the families involved in the reserch have been asked to participate in a second session of interview, based on the retelling of two television programmes, news and fiction. The scope was to explore the way in wich texts from the culture of destination can offer meaningful resources to articulate the two cultural worlds and to make meaning of the experience of the different subjects. A map of the different communicative forms has been drawed for the different cultural groups, defined by the relationships between media (either from the country of origin, or national, or international) and the cultural attitude of the subjects (more keen on cultural integration vs defensive of cultural specificity). The practice of retelling made it possible to explore the strategies of construction of an "hibrid" identity, as well as the way in which media texts are used as a reflexive resource. Finally, the analysis of life histories made it possible to deepen the understanding of cultural attitudes of the subjects interviewed, with particular emphasis on the temporal dimension and the role of memory in the definition of identity.