Currently employed at the Università di Cagliari, Italy Doctorate (Napoli, "L'Orientale", Italy); MA (Durham, UK) |  Open diary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 26 October 2009 Good news! I've obtained a two-year research fellowship from Sardinia's regional government (European funds), better paid than my current contract as research associate. Good to see that there's still some institution that cares about researchers in this country. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 28 October 2009 Quite confusing day. The Italian government has presented the new 'university reform'. It is not clear if there will be a new tenure-track position for early career academics replacing the existing permanent reseacher (there have been constrasting versions of the official draft circulating today on the web). In any case, the Parliamentary process of approval will be long (2-3 years?) and unpredictable in its outcomes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 31 October 2009 I've finished co-writing (with Alberto) the chapter on urban justice, now we have to finalise that on citizenship. Very interesting topics! Just shortly after sending my final version to Alberto I've come across the new book by Amartya Sen entitled The Idea of Justice. Only few pages are available in Google Books, and I wonder if I should buy it online (needless to say, I dont't expect the university library here buying the book in a reasonably short time..). I recently bought two recent books by Michael Walzer from the web, but I'm still waiting to see them... After all this reading about justice, citizenship, democracy and the like I'm intrigued by the possible relationships between liberal thought (Rawls, Walzer, Sen, Nussbaum etc.) and that of theorists of 'absolute' democracy (Negri, Rancière, Zizek, radical feminists etc.). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4 November 2009 I've received the electronic copy of the cover of my book monograph on the politics of urban development in the historic centre of Naples, which originally was my doctoral dissertation (then substantially revised). I'm quite happy to see it finally (almost) in print. In the list of attachments I've uploaded the cover. The book is entitled Lo Spazio Conteso: Il centro storico di Napoli tra coalizioni e conflitti (Contested Space: The Historic Centre of Naples between Coalitions and Conflicts). It's an attempt to apply Anglo-American literature on the 'new urban politics' to the context of Naples and at the same time to overcome some structuralist limitations in its most common versions, trying to highlight the co-presence of a multiplicity of relatively autonomous sources of power in the urban public realm. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 12 November 2009 We've finished the first draft of the urban political geography's manuscript. We're now entering the general revision stage. Quite happy with the final outcome! It needs to be re-worked a little bit, but in general it seems to be almost ready to be published. Perhaps there are some repetitions: we'been talking of neo-liberalism in several parts of the book and there may be some overlappings, even though being also a textbook it's good that the students are confronted repeatedly with the same concept, hopefully from different perspectives. Links: www.acme-journal.org (the website of the most innovative open access journal in geography) http://nuke.luogoespazio.info/ (an independent website promoted by a group of Italian early career geographers) www.ricercatoriprecari.blogspot.com (the blog of Italian contingent academic researchers) www.ricercatoridemocratici.blogspot.com (the blog of Italian researchers supporting Ignazio Marino as chairman candidate in the Democratic Party) http://www.uniriot.org/uniriotII/ (the website of the radical student movement in Italy) http://www.globalproject.info/ (my favourite 'no-globals') www.ilmanifesto.it (my favourite newspaper) www.internazionale.it (my favourite weekly magazine) |
