Ricerc@Sapienza

In Italy, over the last decades, both the Left and the Right have repeatedly employed American Indians as political icons. The Left and the Right, that is, both adopted and adapted certain real or often outright invented features of American Indian culture and history to promote their own ideas, values, and political campaigns. The essay explores how well-established stereotypes such as those of the ecological Indian, the Indian as victim, and the Indian as fearless warrior, have often surfaced in Italian political discourse.

"In our study, we focused on the way in which a mega-event like Expo, historically built as a ‘social peacemaker’, becomes an opportunity,
for social movements, to express new forms of political protest. Far from considering the Expo as a ‘boost’ for the economy of the city,
the activists interpret it as an attempt to ‘overpower’ citizens, an expropriation of their ‘urban sovereignty’; an attack by the global economy
on the droit à la ville"

In recent decades, social movements have expanded their range of action, adopting a more global perspective. Although many studies have been made of varied national and transnational movements, it still remains a little-studied field that involves the participation of immigrants, especially women, in social movements in Italy. These movements involve various problem areas. The thematic focus of our research is the housing, at the national level, and our chosen case study regards the situation as it presents itself in Rome.

This editorial project aims to explore now-consolidated areas of multidisciplinary research like migration, the meeting of diverse cultures and religions and that of the networks of communities and associations, and to analyze them from a perspective of gender. It was chosen with the hope of adding new evidence to the extensive literature already in existence in regard to each of these issues, and proposes to integrate them through an analysis of those points of intersection whose protagonists are women.

Contemporary social movements focused on environmental and social sustainability, present an emerging need to combine, at least at a symbolic level, the changes in policies with profound transformations in everyday life and, therefore, a need to combine these lifestyle changes with corresponding imagery. The article presents a research on communication (websites, social media and visual identity) of 76 GAS, Solidarity Purchase Groups, active in Italy; among the numerous practices of political consumerism this requires more stable forms of engagement.