1,720,965 research outputs found
Comunità come solidarietà: la gestione collettiva dell'energia in tempi di (molteplici) crisi
No full textLa crisi climatica richiede di ripensare come e da chi l’energia viene prodotta e utilizzata. Considerando l’importanza del ruolo di relazioni solidali e pratiche di mutuo aiuto nella risposta a un evento disastroso, il presente contributo sostiene che queste debbano essere integrate nei processi di generazione diffusa dell’energia. Prendendo in considerazione il caso delle comunità energetiche rinnovabili si riflette sulle modalità di costituzione di comunità sociali ed energetiche, analizzando quali sono gli obiettivi, i valori e le caratteristiche che le rendono strumenti importanti nella riduzione delle vulnerabilità dei sistemi energetici.The climate crisis requires to rethink how and by whom energy is produced and used. Considering the importance of the role played by solidarity and mutual aid relationships and practices in disaster preparedness, this contribution argues that these must be integrated into distributed energy systems. Considering the case of Renewable Energy Communities, it reflects on the ways in which social and energy communities are established, analysing what goals, values and characteristics make them important devices in reducing the vulnerabilities of energy systems
Sociologia dei disastri e transizione ecologica. L’approccio della preparedness
No full textLa pandemia di Covid-19 e la guerra in Ucraina hanno mostrato come i “disastri” rappresentino la manifestazione più evidente dei modi che definiscono il “normale” come patologico (Elliot, Hagen, 2021). A questo si legano le vulnerabilità infrastrutturali dei sistemi complessi delle high-carbon societies, come mostrato dalle crescenti difficoltà nell’approvvigionamento di materie prime critiche sia per la digitalizzazione sia per la transizione energetica. Proponendo l’espressione silicon preparedness, il presente contributo vuole sottolineare il carattere materiale, ad un tempo situato, radicato ed esteso, planetario, della preparedness nell’ambito del capitalismo digitale, connettendo la “storia in primo piano” con la “storia sullo sfondo” , cioè osservando le condizioni di possibilità socio-materiali attraverso cui “prepararsi ad essere pronti” e intendendo la preparadness come opportunità di trasformazione delle attuali relazioni socio-ecologiche
COVID-19 pandemic and tourism. (Not) Getting back to normal in tourism-dependent Pacific island economies.
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected the tourism industry on a
global scale. While the reduction of flights and cruise ships during lockdown
has positively affected global carbon emissions (Gössling et al., 2021), locally
the decrease of leisure mobilities due to border closures has had a severe
impact especially on tourism-dependent island economies, already suffering
from climate change impacts and facing several economic and socio-ecological
challenges. Indeed, if the virus has not reached the majority of Pacific
Island states and territories due to their preventive efforts to stop international
arrivals to preserve health systems - contextually causing delays in the repatriation
of citizens stranded abroad (McClure, 2021) - the lack of tourism
and related mobilities from march 2020 caused one of the biggest economic
contractions in their history, with remittances and private investments that
suddenly plummeted. Nonetheless, is it worth noting that, even if confronted
with severe losses of income and in the absence of effective political measures,
many Pacific Islanders have been able to cope by relying on customary
knowledge, systems, and practices (Scheyvens & Movono, 2020) while many
businesses have been able to rapidly adapt to the new tourism market (procedures
of health control, digitalization, promotion of nomadic work).
In this context, the post-pandemic recovery is being represented as a unique
opportunity to reset entrenched systems (Foley et al., 2022; Gössling et al.,
2021; Lamers & Student, 2021) and enhance policies that can favor a just
green recovery in different sectors, tourism included. In this respect, it has
been suggested that substituting the globalized international flows with more
sustainable local/regional ones might contribute to the achievement of the
Sustainable Development Goals (Seyfi et al., 2022). Moreover, the post-pandemic
recovery might be a stimulus to move toward more ethical forms of
tourism (Sheller, 2021a), thus paying attention to its environmental impacts
as well as to how tourist practices both affect the governance of movement
and are impacted by kinopolitics.
Through an in-depth literature review, ranging from tourism studies, to
development and mobilities studies perspectives, the aim of this chapter is to
elaborate preliminary considerations on the necessity to resist and restructure
unsustainable tourism models in Pacific small island states after the pandemic.
Specifically, the present chapter attempts to give answers to the following
questions: have tourism practices changed in tourism-dependent Pacific Island
economies after the pandemic disruptions? Is COVID-19 an opportunity
to rethink the entire model of tourism in the Pacific region and make it more
sustainable, thus providing economic benefits without sacrificing socio-environmental
concerns? Or is the crave for a fast economic recovery and the uneven
pressure on tourism-dependent economies, such as small island states,
leading to “getting back to normal, even if normal was the problem”
Evolving geometries. Power, territory, and knowledge in the infrastructure of energy communities
No full textEnergy communities seem to hold great promise for addressing the challenges of a just energy transition. They are expected to shift energy production to local territories, bring new actors into energy governance and intervene to reshape existing power dynamics. However, these expectations often lead to placing the responsibility for change on communities, as if they were designed to mechanically transform energy systems. This ignores the fact that energy communities navigate through domains of uncertainty where techno-managerial approaches impede the possibilities for radical change. The article suggests that adopting an infrastructural perspective can enhance and innovate the discourse on energy communities in the social sciences. Arguing that both energy infrastructures and energy communities exist in a field of tension in which three crucial infrastructural dimensions – power, territory, and knowledge – create different relational geometries, this paper proposes a new categorisation for understanding energy communities through an infrastructural lens. The aim is to identify which specific geometries of power, territory and knowledge are best positioned to build energy communities capable of challenging the current energy infrastructure. The article states that energy communities are neither conservative nor inherently revolutionary, suggesting that the transformative capacity of energy communities depends on specific infrastructural assemblages
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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