13 research outputs found
Una web survey rivolta agli studenti italiani di scuola secondaria di secondo grado: nota metodologica
No full textIl contributo si pone l'obiettivo di ricostruire l'insieme delle scelte operative salienti compiute nell'indagine sui giovani italiani di scuola secondaria di secondo grado presentata nel volume. I punti essenziali su cui esso insiste sono i seguenti: l'uso del questionario online; la strategia di coinvolgimento degli istituti scolastici nell’indagine; il confronto tra popolazione studentesca e campione effettivamente raggiunto (di cui si traccia il profilo socio-demografico)
Melody Makers: Gonzalo Tena on Gertrude Stein
No full textA guide to the exhibition "Stanzas" comprising works by Spanish artist Gonzalo Tena and inspired by the writings of American author Gertrude Stein. The exhibition was held in Barcelona, at Galeria Maeght
Language and Public Culture
No full textLanguage and Public Culture is a resource for the study of English. The result of two courses taught by the author at Sapienza University of Rome, the book draws on a variety of texts to enhance students' critical reading skills. The volume is divided into two parts and approaches linguistic analysis from the vantage point of recent debates on key cultural issues, such as power and gender. Part I, "Political Language and Phantasy," discusses twentieth-century controversial figures of British Prime Ministers. Part II, "Masculinity, Femininity, and the Language of the Press," takes on gender representations in verbal and visual media texts and includes discussions of key twentieth-century American writers like Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.The book has a two-part structure. In Part I, “Political Language and Phantasy,” I draw on the resources of psychoanalysis to discuss the language and persona of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, I propose that political discourse is a public version of the individual drama of an ego that, by saying ego, comes into public being. Following up on this analysis, Part II of the book invites students who, in the majority of cases, had not been exposed to discussions of gender, to analyse verbal and visual texts to see how they enforce certain dominant views of identities of masculinity and femininity
Roma multiculturale. Stranieri tra concentrazione e dispersione
No full textCome teorizzato dalla Scuola di Chicago e dalle riflessioni più recenti sui processi globali, il flusso delle migrazioni internazionali e l’insediamento delle comunità straniere ha da sempre rappresentato l’elemento costitutivo dei processi di diffusione urbana e di mutamento sociale (Sassen, 1994; tr.it., 2010, Castells, 1972). Gli studiosi sono stati particolarmente attratti dallo studio dei fenomeni di concentrazione e di segregazione spaziale (DuBois, 1899; Stone, 1908; Ross, 1914; Thomas e Znaniecki, 1920; Thomas, 1921; Burgess, 1925; Wirth, 1927; Stonequist, 1935; Hoyt, 1939; Ullman, 1945; Dollard, 1937; Park, 1950; Clark, 1965; Murdie, 1969; Wacquant, 1993) i cui esiti riconoscibili si rintracciano in una singolare distribuzione delle comunità straniere sul territorio metropolitano apparentemente non uniforme rispetto al resto della popolazione (Ferrarotti, 1970; DeMatteis, 1993; Motta, 2006; Morelli, Sonnino, Travaglini, 2002; Meini, 2005; Mantovan, Faiella, 2011; Cristaldi, 2011-2012; Cipollini, 2012; Cipollini, Truglia 2015; Celata, Lucciarini S., (a cura di), 2016; Morcellini, 2016; D’Albergo, De Leo, 2018). La mia proposta si inserisce all’interno di questo notevole background sociologico approfondendo il rapporto fra migrazioni e la struttura urbana della metropoli romana, facendo emergere come la “frattura tra centro e periferie” (Ferrarotti, 1970; Sassen, 1994; tr.it., 2000), segnata dalla presenza dall’imponente GRA, e la “distanza culturale” tra autoctoni e le 27 maggiori comunità straniere presenti a Roma esercitano una significativa influenza sulla formazione di “tendenze abitative” (o cluster spaziali) intese come la tendenza di alcuni gruppi etnici ad occupare specifiche aree metropolitane favorendo la formazione di enclaves o territori etnici (Park,1925). In conclusione, approfondendo il rapporto tra comunità straniere e struttura urbana, verranno individuati 3 diversi modelli spaziali: la dispersione lineare (processo di espulsione di alcuni gruppi etnici nelle aree suburbane e marginali della periferia), concentrazione interstiziale (processo di concentrazione delle comunità straniere all’interno della “città compatta”) e, nel caso specifico della città di Roma, la “coabitazione” (la compresenza di comunità straniere culturalmente diverse) (Marcuse, 2000; Boal, 2005; Cervelli, 2016; Casacchia, Natale, 2003; Crisci, 2010; Cristaldi, 2012). La base empirica del lavoro deriva dall’utilizzo di statistiche ufficiali fornite dall’Ufficio Statistico di Roma Capitale (anno di riferimento 2017), si tratta quindi di un’analisi secondaria di dati avente come unità di analisi le 155 zone urbanistiche in cui è suddiviso il territorio del Comune di Roma e aggregate successivamente secondo le esigenze di analisi in due macroaree: Quadranti (Hoyt, 1939) e Cerchi Concentrici (Burgess,1925). Le analisi statistiche sono state precedute da una fase di “preparazione” nella quale le variabili originarie sono state trasformate in tassi, quozienti formalizzati e indici (etero-etnicità, internazionalizzazione, squilibrio urbano e popolazione straniera) per poi essere sottoposte ad analisi multivariate (ANOVA e correlazioni) per comprendere i nessi causali e le relazioni significative tra le comunità straniere e lo spazio urbano. Infine, i risultati sono stati georeferenziati su ciascuna zona urbanistica della metropoli romana attraverso il programma di analisi spaziale QGis permettendo di individuare i 4 cluster spaziali e i tre modelli insediativi
Persuasion and critical-theoretical thought
No full textMy contribution takes on the notion of persuasion from the vantage point of the more theoretical developments of literary criticism, from poststructuralism to the present. I take my cue from the current debate on “postcritique” (Rita Felski 2015; R. Felski and Elizabeth Anker 2017), a label that comprises a heterogeneous set of trends all of which nevertheless share the common task of re-evaluating the hermeneutics of suspicion, seeking alternatives to it. Discussion highlights the widespread need for more ethical ways of reading after poststructuralism (Eve K. Sedgwick 1997, 2002; Amanda Anderson 2006); the fact that this ethical turn seems to require new styles of argumentation (Pardis Dabashi 2020) offers here the opportunity to look back at a central tenet of classical argumentation, persuasion, to reflect on its role in the transformation of Anglophone literary criticism. The contribution is articulated in three sections – “Publicness,” “Paranoia and Persuasion,” and “The solitude of the critic” – whose overall aim is to illustrate the progressive withdrawal of persuasion from the oratorical public setting theorized by Aristotle, which presupposes a uniform collectivity, to a much more shadowy subjective dimension of tensions and conflicts. T
The first section builds on a reading of Austen’s novel Persuasion (1818), which marks a rupture with the traditional notion of persuasion steeped in the constraints of oratorical interaction and inaugurates the “privatization of literary expression” with the rise of an absorbed cultural observer capable of distancing herself from her immediate environment and scrutinize its works both from the margins and from the outside. This part connects Austen’s withdrawal from a uniform publicness with the twentieth-century emergence of the notion of discourse with a reading of Foucault’s “Discourse on Language,” the inaugural lecture livered at the Collège de France in 1970. The reading of Foucault expands on the progressive withdrawal from a problematic publicness inherited from the rhetorical tradition and transfers the withdrawal to the figure of the literary theorist. In section 2, “ Paranoia and Persuasion,” the work of theorist Eve K. Sedgwick exemplifies those practitioners who sought relief from persuasion as it was actualized by the exigencies of pluralism in the second half of the twentieth century (for example with the notion of communion between an implied author and an implied reader) and further break away from the rhetorical bond between author and reader, insisting that finding oneself outside the discursive community is a real possibility. But the work of Sedgwick also points to an impasse: on the one hand, rhetorical persuasion has waned in modern criticism, on the other hand, the latter’s theoretical transformation seems to have internalized persuasion. Hinged on the link power-knowledge, the poststructuralist posture of the knowledge seeker depends on an always already persuaded audience who is uniformly convinced that our symbolic, cultural productions are entangled in relations of power.
While this contribution tracks the disentanglement of criticism from the classical oratorical tradition, the poststructuralist impasse invites a re-examination of persuasion in the ways we read and argue in the academic public sphere
The changing school: the impact of digitalization on Work Experience Programs (PCTOs). From design to implementation
No full textThanks to ICT, schools were able to reinforce the construction of synergistic collaboration networks with the world of businesses, expanding the training offer of Work Experience Programs (PCTOs) and giving students the possibility to participate in immersive on-the-job experiences which are particularly innovative in terms of their digital components. The reflection on the new features of the academic design of Work Experience Programs, contingent to the differing degrees of digitalization attributable to projects, can be traced back to the research activities carried out by a group of scholars from “La Sapienza” University of Rome within the purview of the Research Project of National Interest (PRIN) “Evaluating the School-Work Alternance: a longitudinal study in Italian upper secondary schools”. The reference empirical base for the analysis comprises 249 Work Experience Programs (AY 2021/2022), directly uploaded by 78 Italian upper-secondary schools – divided into traditional, technical and vocational institutes – onto a digital platform dedicated to the storage of materials. An inspection procedure was set up for the projects' content, structured by keywords, which resulted in the identification of 65 Work Experience Programs, which were then in turn examined to highlight the features and specifics which ultimately allowed for the discernment of first and second level digital content projects. The Work-Experience Programs' digital component was evaluated with respect to the offer of professionalizing experiences, connected with on-offline learning modules, whose prerogative is that of propagating the principal types of literacy associated with the digital. The latter are to be considered social practices located at the center of the didactic training strategy of Work Experience Programs, whose objective is channeling a complex and integrated system of technical, relational and value-based resources, on which the concrete development of digital skills depends
Changes in Schooling: The Impact of Digitalization on PCTO (Work Experience Programs). From Planning to Implementation
No full textThanks to ICT, schools were able to reinforce the construction of synergistic collaboration networks with the world of businesses, expanding the training offer of Work Experience Programs (PCTOs) and giving students the possibility to participate in immersive on-the-job experiences which are particularly innovative in terms of their digital components. The reflection on the new features of the academic design of Work Experience Programs, contingent to the differing degrees of digitalization attributable to projects, can be traced back to the research activities carried out by a group of scholars from “La Sapienza” University of Rome within the purview of the Research Project of National Interest (PRIN) “Evaluating the School-Work Alternance: a longitudinal study in Italian upper secondary schools”. The reference empirical base for the analysis comprises 249 Work Experience Programs (AY 2021/2022), directly uploaded by 78 Italian upper-secondary schools – divided into traditional, technical and vocational institutes – onto a digital platform dedicated to the storage of materials. An inspection procedure was set up for the projects' content, structured by keywords, which resulted in the identification of 65 Work Experience Programs, which were then in turn examined to highlight the features and specifics which ultimately allowed for the discernment of first and second level digital content projects. The Work-Experience Programs' digital component was evaluated with respect to the offer of professionalizing experiences, connected with on-offline learning modules, whose prerogative is that of propagating the principal types of literacy associated with the digital. The latter are to be considered social practices located at the center of the didactic training strategy of Work Experience Programs, whose objective is channeling a complex and integrated system of technical, relational and value-based resources, on which the concrete development of digital skills depends
“Atomic Wonders: Radioactive Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Fiction”
No full textIn the words of American historian Henry Adams, when in 1898 Marie Curie extracted from uranium ore the two ‘new’ elements that she (and Pierre Curie and later Gustave Bémont) called polonium and radium, an entirely new age began. Adams calls the more intriguing ‘matter’, radium, a “metaphysical bomb”. Indeed, as Lawrence Badash has made clear, after the tremendous craze for Roentgen’s X-Ray photography in the late 1890s, radium had to wait before it eventually made a similar scientific and epistemic global impact. And yet, in the words of historian of science Luis Campos, it was “the most wonderful and perplexing thing the modern world had ever seen – or had never seen...”. A substance both new and old, rare and unprecedently powerful, it seemed to offer amazement and riches, even at a time (from the late nineteenth century to the Thirties) when its tremendous potential for damage was unknown. Already in 1895, had the novel The Crack of Doom by Irish author Robert Cromie portrayed an atomic explosion, one year ahead of Becquerel’s discovery of ‘radioactivity’. But it was after 1898, on the spur of the international mania for radium as spectacle and as commodity, that literature recorded and responded to such amazing scientific discoveries with works that read it as a potential instrument for destruction, as a very vibrant matter enmeshed in a global market of imperial exploitation, but also as a literal source of future political revolution. In this chapter I read both Tono-Bungay (1909) and The World Set Free (1914) by HG Wells, who certainly read and appreciated physicist Frederick Soddy’s 1909 work The Interpretation of Radium and who imagines a world paradoxically made free by unleashed atomic energy in a fictional ‘world to end all wars’. But I also attend to a very different and controversial voice, that of Marie Corelli, whose interest in science, and radioactivity in particular, is less obviously well-known. Her novels The Life Everlasting (1911) and The Young Diana (1918) offer a different view of radium, by depicting it as a source of “life”, with vitalizing and rejuvenating effects which were also experimented upon in laboratories around the world
Properties of Divergence-Free Kernel Methods for Approximation and Solution of Partial Differential Equations
No full textabstract: Divergence-free vector field interpolants properties are explored on uniform and scattered nodes, and also their application to fluid flow problems. These interpolants may be applied to physical problems that require the approximant to have zero divergence, such as the velocity field in the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and the magnetic and electric fields in the Maxwell's equations. In addition, the methods studied here are meshfree, and are suitable for problems defined on complex domains, where mesh generation is computationally expensive or inaccurate, or for problems where the data is only available at scattered locations.
The contributions of this work include a detailed comparison between standard and divergence-free radial basis approximations, a study of the Lebesgue constants for divergence-free approximations and their dependence on node placement, and an investigation of the flat limit of divergence-free interpolants. Finally, numerical solvers for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in primitive variables are implemented using discretizations based on traditional and divergence-free kernels. The numerical results are compared to reference solutions obtained with a spectral
method.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Applied Mathematics 201
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No full textComparative genomics studies in primates are extremely restricted because we only have access to a few types of cell lines from non-human apes and to a limited collection of frozen tissues. In order to gain better insight into regulatory processes that underlie variation in complex phenotypes, we must have access to faithful model systems for a wide range of tissues and cell types. To facilitate this, we have generated a panel of 7 fully characterized chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines derived from fibroblasts of healthy donors. All lines appear to be free of integration from exogenous reprogramming vectors, can be maintained using standard iPSC culture techniques, and have proliferative and differentiation potential similar to human and mouse lines. To begin demonstrating the utility of comparative iPSC panels, we collected RNA sequencing data and methylation profiles from the chimpanzee iPSCs and their corresponding fibroblast precursors, as well as from 7 human iPSCs and their precursors, which were of multiple cell type and population origins. Overall, we observed much less regulatory variation within species in the iPSCs than in the somatic precursors, indicating that the reprogramming process has erased many of the differences observed between somatic cells of different origins. We identified 4,918 differentially expressed genes and 3,598 differentially methylated regions between iPSCs of the two species, many of which are novel inter-species differences that were not observed between the somatic cells of the two species. Our panel will help realise the potential of iPSCs in primate studies, and in combination with genomic technologies, transform studies of comparative evolution
