Chiara Bassetti

Università degli Studi di Trento | UNITN · Department of Sociology and Social Research

Balconies, verandas and courtyards are part of our homes, shared with household or condominium fellows, but extending into the public space for the visibility they allow as compared to the indoor. They constitute the porous (Benjamin and Lācis, 1978) borders of the home, and configure as liminal spaces in the "geography" of private, parochial and p...

Whereas “professional vision” has been mostly analyzed in apprenticeship and other settings where knowledge is made explicit or reflected upon, I focus on how expertise tacitly plays out in task-oriented interaction among practitioners. The paper considers orientation both to the coworker’s (recipient design) and one’s own (expressive order) expert...

To sustain the energy of social occasions, Italians often engage in a form of casual conversation that prioritizes sociability and the production of cheerful and vociferous ‘talking together’. This form of mundane talking (chiacchierare) features much simultaneous speaking and no competition for turns at talk, hence differs significantly from commo...

The development of artificial agents for social interaction pushes to enrich robots with social skills and knowledge about (local) social norms. One possibility is to distinguish the expressive and the functional orders during a human-robot interaction. The overarching aim of this work is to set a framework to make the artificial agent socially-com...

This chapter investigates instructions, instructed, and instructive actions in the theatrical dance studio. Focusing on performative learning as the instructed production of expressive, aesthetic conduct such as dancing, I explore its instruct-ability and the role observability and intersubjectivity play in that. I examine how and when teachers int...

In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of Citizen Science (CS) research projects with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and on the modalities in which CS is employed in this field. The query was conducted in March 2022 and provided us with 929 items, of which 646 were research articles. Through the usage of the PRISMA fl...

The development of artificial agents for social interaction pushes to enrich robots with social skills and knowledge about (local) social norms. One possibility is to distinguish the expressive and the functional orders during a human-robot interaction. The overarching aim of this work is to set a framework to make the artificial agent socially-com...

“Sharing economy” and “collaborative economy” refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models, digital platforms and forms of work that characterise contemporary life: from community-led initiatives and activist campaigns, to the impact of global sharing platforms in contexts such as network hospitality, transportation, etc. Sharing the co...

Purpose This explorative study aims to investigate work precariousness (WP) among EU27-based economically dependent solo self-employed, i.e. those with no employees and usually relying on just one client. Design/methodology/approach Univariate and multivariate analyses of European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) (2015) and Eurostat data. Finding...

This open access book considers the development of the sharing and collaborative economy with a European focus, mapping across economic sectors, and country-specific case studies. It looks at the roles the sharing economy plays in sharing and redistribution of goods and services across the population in order to maximise their functionality, moneta...

Since its heyday, the Italian sharing economy has emblematically displayed the problem of a wanting and largely ineffective regulatory environment. To date, the Italian legislator has been unable to formulate a consistent legal response to the main social and economic challenges stemming from the sharing economy, opting for ad hoc reactive measures...

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking t...

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking t...

Emerging out of the collaborative work conducted within the Working Group “Mechanisms to activate and support the collaborative economy” of the COST Action “From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy”, the book questions the varied set of organizational forms collected under the label of “collaborative” o...

The book titled The Collaborative Economy in Action: European Perspectives is one of the important outcomes of the COST Action CA16121, From Sharing to Caring: Examining the Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy (short name: Sharing and Caring; sharingandcaring.eu) that was active between March 2017 and September 2021. The Action was...

Conversations among Italians often entail many-at-a-time rather than one-at-a-time speaking. This “talking together” is a deliberate aim of parties and a relevant aspect of their social life. It is a variant system for organizing ordinary talk. We describe how simultaneity is organized, how participants collaborate to maintain the orderliness of th...

Il libro si concentra sul ruolo del corpo nei processi di socializzazione e apprendimento, da un lato, e di costruzione identitaria, dall’altro. Lo fa a partire dal caso della danza di teatro occidentale, analizzando il modo in cui il saper(far)e per lo più tacito e corporeo – performativo – che la caratterizza viene trasmesso, appreso e va a modif...

Il libro considera la danza di teatro occidentale e analizza il processo creativo che conduce dal “nulla” all’opera d’arte performativa. Guarda dunque a quell’attività artistica che consiste nel “fare danza assieme”, considerando il continuum improvvisazione-composizione, la messa in atto di un saper(far)e corporeo e cinestetico culturalmente speci...

The paper presents the case study of a digital complementary currency, Santacoin (SC), co-designed, implemented and deployed at a 10-day performing art festival in Italy. SC allowed participants to create a parallel economy within the blurring boundaries of the festival. As such, the case study constitutes a sort of ‘serious game live’, as it was e...

The article opens a window on the complex knowledge generation processes shaping large, cross-national Research-through-Design projects. We describe and discuss the distributed fieldwork and co-design activities conducted along a period of over two years in a European project, to consider the implications that a cross-national field brings forward...

The paper concerns the development of digitally-mediated technologies that value social cooperation as a common good rather than as a source of revenue and accumulation. The paper discusses the activities that shaped a European participatory design project which aims to develop a digital space that promotes and facilitates the ‘Commonfare’, a compl...

This contribution consists of an elaboration of two interviews with Randall Collins, held in Trento and Milan in Spring 2017, during the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the journal Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa. Collins touches on his early career and the relationship with prominent figures in the field of sociology such as Erving Goffma...

This contribution presents the Commonfare / PIE News project, funded by the European Commission within the Horizon 2020 framework program, and the commonfare.net platform, which constitutes the main tool and result of the project. The core project objectives include the promotion of alternative and sustainable forms of bottom-up self-management of...

A partire da una serie di interviste con compositori e altri «creativi musicali», il capitolo analizza l'universo del discorso della comunità artistica considerata e le tensioni implicite che lo abitano, focalizzandosi in particolare sul processo di apprendimento, socializzazione e carriera nel campo artistico-professionale. La categoria «creativi...

The Spectacle 2.0 recasts Debord’s theory of spectacle within the frame of 21st-century digital capitalism. It offers a reassessment of Debord’s original notion of Spectacle from the late 1960s, of its posterior revisitation in the 1990s, and it presents a reinterpretation of the concept within the scenario of contemporary informational capitalism...

This interview with Elijah Anderson has been recorded in Trento (Italy) on July 8, 2016; it has been conducted in an informal setting by Chiara Bassetti and Andrea Mubi Brighenti for Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa. The interview deals with Anderson's approach to ethnography and fieldwork, his research achievements and current projects, as well as...

This workshop aims at stimulating and opening a debate around the capacity of Participatory Design (PD) and other co-design approaches to deliver outcomes and methodologies that can have an impact and value for reuse well beyond the local context in which they were originally developed. This will be achieved by stimulating the submission of positio...

This chapter considers the work of Gary Alan Fine, probably the most prolific contemporary cultural ethnographer and one of the key contributors to the sociology of small groups. In the chapter, Fine’s intellectual journey is explored, from his earlier studies on the Baseball little league to his recent research on ‘futurework’ and the way forecast...

This interview with Elijah Anderson has been recorded in Trento (Italy) on July 8, 2016; it has been conducted in an informal setting by Chiara Bassetti and Andrea Mubi Brighenti for Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa. The interview deals with Anderson's approach to ethnography and fieldwork, his research achievements and current projects, as well as...

The chapter focuses on sociological notions that can be embedded into computer vision methods and techniques. It offers, first, an overview on the sociological understandings of social interaction, thereby proposing a distinction between different kinds of interaction, namely unfocused, common- focused and jointly-focused (cf. [17,18,30]). Second,...

Taking the highly-institutionalized, socio-technical domain of airport security as its empirical basis, the article focuses on interorganizational workplaces marked by public/private dialectics, and their impact on changing work practices, identity processes, and power-resistance relations. The empirical material stems from the ethnography that I c...

Although crowd analysis is a classical and extensively studied problem for the computer vision community, the vast majority of the works in the literature assume a single type of crowd, while the sociological literature classifies a number of different typologies, each one with their own distinctive traits. In this paper we focus on a particular ki...

The chapter presents a novel interdisciplinary approach that integrates micro-sociological analysis into computer-vision and pattern-recognition modeling and algorithms, the purpose being to tackle socio-technical complexity at a systemic yet micro-grounded level. The approach is empirically-grounded and both theoretically- and analytically-driven,...

This is a theoretical and empirical contribution on rhythm in social interaction, meant to enlighten its role in the situated interactional «management» of power relations, in both ordinary situations and culturally-specific contexts. To this aim, we adapt the Weberian notion of charisma to the realm of micro-interaction, and we connect it to the d...

The topic of crowd modeling in computer vision usually assumes a single generic typology of crowd, which is very simplistic. In this paper we adopt a taxonomy that is widely accepted in sociology, focusing on a particular category, the spectator crowd, which is formed by people " interested in watching something specific that they came to see " [6]...

There is an error in the first sentence of the Evaluation Metrics subsection of the Experiments section. The correct sentence is: As accuracy measures, we adopt the metrics proposed in [3] and extended in [12]: we consider a group as correctly estimated if at least ⌈(T ⋅ ∣G∣)⌉ of their members are found by the grouping method and correctly detected...

The article focuses on emerging forms of “free work”, in which the boundaries between work and leisure are completely blurred. It does so through an ethnography of Tin-Hat, a small Italian association that successfully designed, produced and marketed an “independent” Role-play Game. Tin-Hat members express their passions and creativity outside thei...

Based on an ethnographic case study, the article focuses on the cultural repertoires of motherhood and their moral normativity, and considers the identitarian, emotional, and affective “re-organization” that “becoming mother” demands. Such re-compositional work concerns everyday caring practices as much as self-construction and self- narration, and...

Detection of groups of interacting people is a very interesting and useful task in many modern technologies, with application fields spanning from video-surveillance to social robotics. In this paper we first furnish a rigorous definition of group considering the background of the social sciences: this allows us to specify many kinds of group, so f...

Understanding whether an event attracted the audience's attention and which moments were mostly enjoyable is a primary goal for sport and show business managers. OZ (Osservare l'attenZione { Observing attention) is an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods project that aims at developing a technology able to automatically detect at run time spectators' a...

We propose a new type of crowd analysis, focused on the spectator crowd, that is, people ``interested in watching something specific that they came to see''. This scenario applies on stadiums, amphitheaters etc., and shares some aspects with classical crowd monitoring: actually, many people are simultaneously observed, so that per-person analysis i...

We focus on the automated analysis of spectator crowd, that is, people watching sport contests alive (in stadiums, amphitheaters etc.), or, more generally, people “watching the activities of an event […] interested in watching something specific that they came to see” [2]. This scenario differs substantially from the typical crowd analysis setting...

Based on a multi-sited ethnography on Western theatrical dance, the article focuses on the “problem of the male dancer”. Once discussed the historical genealogy of the stigma and its effect on men’s participation in dance, I consider three stigma “antidotes”. Two of them - artistic-professional excellence, manifest in structural inequalities, profe...

This chapter considers some aspects of an ethnomethodologically oriented ethnography that has been carried out in a medical Emergency Response Centre (ERC) before, during, and after an IS-related organizational change. After a description of the everyday work in the ERC and its larger social arena, the authors discuss the main changes and the users...