Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Università degli Studi di Venezia Ca' Foscari
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Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts
No full text"Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts" explores how readers and viewers engage cognitively and affectively with ethically troubling artworks across literature, the visual and performing arts, and screen media. Drawing on aesthetics, cultural history and theory, psychology, and neuroscience, Stefano Ercolino and Massimo Fusillo introduce the concept of “negative empathy” to describe the ambivalent and destabilizing affective responses elicited by representations of negativity in art. Rather than dismissing empathy as naïve, the authors argue for a more nuanced understanding of its darker forms and their cognitive and ethical value. Through a comparative and intermedial approach, the book analyzes case studies from Littell’s "The Kindly Ones" to Wilson’s "Deafman Glance"; from Verdi’s "Macbeth" and Nitsch’s Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries to Caravaggio’s "Martyrdom of Saint Matthew," Mapplethorpe’s "'X' Portfolio," Kiefer’s "The Seven Heavenly Palaces," Haneke’s "The White Ribbon," and Gilligan’s "Breaking Bad"—offering a compelling new theory of aesthetic engagement
The optimization of crop response to climatic stress through modulation of plant stress response mechanisms. Opportunities for biostimulants and plant hormones to meet climate challenges
Full text linkThis review discusses the use of agronomic management practices to enhance crop stress resilience to climate stress through the modulation of natural plant growth regulatory pathways. The use of biostimulants or plant hormones to improve crop resilience is subject to strict regulatory oversight if changes in the regulation of plant growth are implied. Climate change is a major threat to crop potential and is characterized by both long-term shifts in temperature and precipitation patterns as well as increased occurrence of extreme weather events, posing an immediate threat to agriculture. Breeding and exogenous inputs have been used to enhance cropping system resilience, although these management practices are either too slow or constrained by cost and availability, to address rapidly emerging climate challenges. Exogenous biostimulants, microbials and plant hormones have shown great promise as novel mechanisms to optimize natural plant resilience, resulting in immediate but non-permanent improvements in plant responses to climate-induced stresses, representing a powerful but underexplored approach to enhance crop productivity under climate stress. The use of these exogenous inputs is, however, constrained by outdated and scientifically unsound regulations that consider any such modification as pesticidal in nature. The failure to modernize regulatory frameworks for the use of biostimulants in agriculture will constrain the development of safe effective tools and deprive growers of means to respond to climate change. Here, we discuss the scientific rationale for eliminating the regulatory barriers governing biostimulants or products that modulate plant regulatory networks and propose a framework for enabling legislation to strengthen cropping system resilience
Structural purification of technical lignins via fractional dissolution using non-azeotropic solvent mixtures
Full text linkTwo technical lignins, a softwood kraft lignin (SKL) and a wheat straw organosolv lignin (WSOSL) were fractionated using a Soxhlet extractor that was connected to a piston pump for solvent movement such that Soxhlet extraction using non-azeotropic solvent mixtures was feasible. Fractionation of the lignins using such solvent mixtures that could be tuned in terms of hydrogen-bond acceptor and donor characteristics and polarities yielded novel fractions not accessible in standard Soxhlet-based fractionations. Two SKL fractions could be obtained applying aqueous acetone that displayed homogeneous structural characteristics while differing significantly in molecular weights. WSOSL could be gradually purified, allowing for the generation of a rather pure lignin carbohydrate complex (LCC) fraction and a purified high molecular weight lignin fraction
Realia e fatticci
No full textThe aim of this tribute to Federica Fontana, starting from a research proposed by Bruno Latour, is to submit to scholarly reflection a new analysis of the crucial role of materiality in the study of 'sacred' practices as well as Western classificatory categories
Riflessioni su alcune categorie fondanti della Storia delle Religioni a partire da B.Latour: "il culto moderno dei fatticci"
No full text"Il fare e l’agire" quali fondamenti di culti e credenze e in particolare di categorie raramente sono stati oggetto di analisi concettuale e storiografica in ambito storico religioso.Scopo di questo contributo è di riflettere in chiave interrogativa sul processo storico e culturale di elaborazione di alcune categorie principali della Storia delle Religioni a partire dagli interrogativi proposti dall' analisi interdisciplinare di Latour sul culto dei 'fatticci'
Chinese passive constructions in environmental discourse: A corpus-assisted functional study from an ecolinguistic perspective
No full textThe passive voice has long attracted linguistic interest, yet in Chinese most studies have focused on syntactic or semantic aspects, while discourse-oriented analyses remain scarce. This study adopts a functional-constructionist approach to investigate passive constructions (i.e., bèi-, zāo-, dédào-, huòdé-, shòu- and notional passives) in Chinese environmental discourse, a politically and ideologically sensitive domain. Drawing on the tailor-made Chinese Corpus of Environmental Discourse, covering four genres, and comparing it with the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, the analysis combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings reveal that passive constructions perform a wide range of discourse functions, from vulnerabilizing patients, mitigating environmental crisis, to legitimizing institutional actions, presenting ideologically motivated content as factual, and embedding normative or evaluative stances. Overall, they emerge as powerful devices for patient perspectivization, projecting varying degrees and forms of subjectivity in ways that align with collective values of ecological responsibility
Prayer for the dead and the relocation of purgatorial fire in the seventh century
No full textA purgatorial fire appears in the earliest Christian writings but details of how this worked and for whom it was beneficial were often left unclear. In general, before the seventh century this was understood to take place immediately before the final judgement, so that the souls of the dead experienced purging as part of the experience of the last judgement in preparation for being brought before Christ. During the seventh century western Christian writers’ understanding of the purgatorial fire began to change, partly due to the increasingly popular practice of prayer for the dead. As a result, the post-mortem purgatorial fire was relocated chronologically in the soteriological system so that instead of occurring immediately
before the last judgement, it was understood to occur immediately after death and to be connected with prayers for the dead, so that the living could help to affect the fates of their loved ones in the afterlife. Focusing on the reception of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues and other material by Isidore of Seville (d. 636), the anonymous Liber de ordine creaturarum, and the Prognosticum of Julian of Toledo (688), this paper argues that these authors provide witness to significant changes in how western Christians saw themselves within the larger soteriological schema. Their works offered new opportunities for understanding how people could flourish as Christians, in particular allowing them to participate in actions which affected the health and the state of the souls of their loved ones even after they died. These developments impacted how Christians understood the process of transformation of the soul
which began on earth and continued in the afterlife, how suffering in the present might mitigate suffering in the future, and how repentance in the present could co-operate with purgatorial fire. Developments in eschatology in the twilight of Late Antiquity thus changed the ways that contemporaries understood the health of the soul in the present and in the future, while binding the living and the dead closer together in their shared quest for Christian healthfulness
‘Ubi societas ibi ius’: centering a Sustainable Circular Economy from a sociological perspective
No full textThe transition to a Sustainable Circular Economy (‘SCE’) represents a fundamental shift from the linear ‘take-make-dispose’ model to a regenerative system focused on reuse, recycling and resource recovery. The SCE is an economic model that aims to eliminate waste while increasing resource efficiency and promoting social equity. It is not just one technological improvement among others, but a paradigm that moves away from conventional production-consumption systems to a circular model that prioritizes sustainability at all levels. This chapter aims to present the framework and to analyse its key concepts, issues and actors, as well as the challenges for regulating this transformation process. Regulating SCE is complex because of the multifaceted nature of circular practices. The law and policymaking process must balance the interests of different stakeholders while ensuring global cooperation, particularly through international supply chains. In particular, any policy initiative that places people at the centre (‘human-centred’ model) must confront a sort of duplicity, i.e. the dialectic between the macro dimension (the global scenario) and the micro dimension (social action understood as individual action). These difficulties can explain why recently the green policies seem to be in crisis. Solutions must aim to promote equitable access, ensuring that all individuals, regardless of their background, can benefit from the SCE. The chapter try to reshape the fundamental issues in the SCE and aims to be a call for responsibility of all social actors
Future Roundabouts Relying on 5G, Edge Computing and Artificial Intelligence
No full textThe paper focuses on the behaviour of cooperative, connected and automated vehicles (CCAVs) with the aim of improving traffic flow and safety and providing adequate comfort to vehicle occupants. The study is part of AI@Edge project, founded by the Horizon Europe framework programme. AI@Edge focuses on leveraging AI and Edge computing to enhance 5G networks. The simulation environment is a single-lane mini-roundabout, calibrated on the basis of experimental measurements to accurately replicate the behaviour of human-driven vehicles. A cooperative Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policy, exploiting Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), was developed to optimize the behaviour of CCAVs while negotiating the roundabout. To assess the effectiveness of this policy, a dynamic driving simulator coupled with a microscopic traffic simulator and a graphical simulator was employed. This comprehensive approach included both simulated human-driven vehicles (HDs) and CCAVs, alongside a real human driver. Tests indicate that human drivers respond positively to scenarios with a higher percentage of automated vehicles, due to an enhanced sense of safety and comfort. Quantitative analysis of the policy also demonstrates the capability of CCAVs to reduce fuel consumption and optimize traffic flow
Nuove indagini petrografiche e paleografiche sul ‘Mendolito di Adrano’: un caso esemplare di micro-mobilità interna
No full textThis paper aims to explore the endogenous mobility of Sicily by examining the circulation of epigraphic materials and practices across the island, drawing on the diverse strands of
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scholarship that have emerged over the past three decades in the wake of the mobility turn. Recent research on Mediterranean micro-mobility and the renewed focus on the agency and roles of individual actors in the development of socio-economic networks open up new avenues for investigating interactions between communities and the exchange of know-how among them.
Furthermore, the heuristic shift recently embraced by epigraphic studies—namely, the comprehensive and contextualized analysis of epigraphic documents—now allows for an unprecedented level of detail in the understanding of these testimonies.
Operating at the intersection of these two research directions, our contribution presents new findings from petrographic, palaeographic, and historical-epigraphic analyses of the indigenous-language inscriptions on the block from the site of Mendolito di Adrano, conducted within the framework of the Crossreads project