Simone Tosoni

Catholic University of the Sacred Heart | UNICATT · Department of Media and Entertainment Science

Drawing on a 12-month virtual ethnography on the main online spaces of three refused knowledge communities (RKCs) in Italy, this study aims at contributing to the debate on emerging forms of science- related populism from a two-fold perspective. First, we identify and describe the main features and the role played by an understudied figure who we l...

This report summarises the initial results from the research project "Urban Data Cultures: Understanding Creation and Management of Housing-Related Information in Post-Communist Republics". This project seeks to better understand the how geographically-varied ‘data cultures’ (i.e. variegated representations, values, norms, epistemologies, practices...

The introduction of the volume presents a first overview of the internal variations of Milanese goth—or dark, as the subculture is known in Italy—in the 1980s: the activist, the music club and the loner enactments of dark. It also introduces the conceptual triplet that will be employed in the book to address them: enactment, social practices and su...

The chapter discusses the concept of subcultural canon, adopted—and adapted—from the field of fun studies to account for the consistent distinctiveness of the subculture. The subcultural canon is described as the result of steadily ongoing practices of assemblage and negotiation between members of the subculture, and as open and flexible, with some...

This chapter discusses the approach (grounded theory) and the method (life stories) adopted for the empirical research the books draws on. It also clarifies the main methodological choices adopted, discussing issues of sampling, conduction of the interviews and selection of the excerpts of empirical materials published in the book. After a presenta...

The chapter describes the activist enactment of dark, and the way it took shape from the Milanese anarcho-punk. It starts reporting the rising tensions within the squat Virus between those subjects who started to “play with the codes of dark” and the activist “punx” (how anarcho-punks called themselves). The former, in fact, found the line of front...

In the conclusions, we resume the main theoretical and empirical findings of the previous chapters. Under a theoretical point of view, we discuss how our practice-centred approach, based on the concepts of social practices, canon and enactment, can help accounting for the consistent distinctiveness of a subculture and, at the same time, for its plu...

The chapter presents the loner enactment of dark, which was typical of, but not restricted to, the suburbia and the small towns neighbouring the city of Milan. Differently from the other enactments, in this loner one the experience of subcultural belonging was lived aloneness, or in small isolated groups often composed by members with different sub...

This chapter describes the years of ‘riflusso’ (‘the ebb’) in the city of Milan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, under the social, cultural and political points of view: the years when the movements of the 1970s came to an end and a general withdraw in the private sphere started. Two complementary tendencies could be observed in Milan: the ongoin...

This chapter describes how the music club enactment of dark took shape alongside the activist one retracing the history of Milanese alternative music clubs, and in particular of the Hysterika disco, the main dark club in Milan in the 1980s. The specificities of the disco club enactment are addressed and compared to those of the activist enactment:...

This book is the first in-depth investigation of the Goth subculture in Italy, focusing in particular on the city of Milan. It grows out of a three year research project - the first in Italy of this scope on the topic - based on the life histories of two dozen participants. In light of this, Simone Tosoni and Emanuela Zuccalà propose an innovative...

This book, the fourteenth in the Researching and Teaching Communication Book Series launched in 2006, stems from the communal intellectual work of the lecturers, the students and the alumni of the 2018 edition of the European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School (SuSo). The book gives an account of the plurality of research interests and...

This book consists of the intellectual work of the 2017 European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School organized in cooperation with the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. The chapters cover relevant research topics, structured into three sections: “Int...

This book consists of the intellectual work of the 2017 European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School organized in cooperation with the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. The chapters cover relevant research topics, structured into three sections: “Int...

This introductory chapter gives an introduction to the contributions that are part of the edited volume and to its overall theme. It highlights the current trends in European communication and media research and presents insights on the European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School that took place from 24 July to 5 August 2017, at the Uni...

Drawing on the preliminary findings of an ongoing case study of female solo travelling in Italy, the present chapter intends to propose some methodological considerations about addressing media activities in social practices. In this way, it intends to contribute to the attempt to decentre media studies advocated by authors like Da-vid Morley, Shau...

Post-truth", the 2016 word of the year, has been defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief". In fact, the notion risks becoming little more than a buzzword, given that the epistemic, social, po...

The topic “Present Scenarios of Media Production and Engagement ” is dedicated to the fundamental question: How do production, communication and usage practices change in the present media environment? This volume consists of the intellectual work of the 2016 European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School, organized in cooperation with the...

“Vidding” is the practice of synchronizing a song with excerpts of one or more visual texts (usually a TV series or a cult movie), so to confer new meanings to the video materials. This form of user-generated content usually explores some peculiar aspects of the original materials (the evolution of character or of a relationship), or to confer them...

The present paper explores, for the first time, the Italian appropriations of British goth in Italy, and in particular in the 1980s in Milan. Adopting a practice-based approach and a theoretical framework based on the STS-derived concept of “enactment”, it aims at highlighting the coexistence of different forms of subcultural belonging. In particul...

The chapter presents the early years and the subsequent developments of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), starting from the School of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Strong Programme advanced by David Bloor, introducing its four tenets: symmetry, impartiality, causality, and reflexivity. After presenting the main works done in Laboratory Stu...

The final chapter of the book discusses Trevor Pinch’s more recent works, and addresses three main topics. The first one is the topic of selling, on which the author returns after the mid ‘80s works on market selling. The primary focus is now on the skills and knowledge involved in the practices of selling. In particular, the chapter addresses the...

The chapter addresses the popularization of the main acquisitions of social constructionist sociology in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), done by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch in the volumes of their Golem trilogy, dedicated respectively to science, technology and medicine. The polemical target of the trilogy, the "flip-flop" und...

The chapter focuses on the Social Construction of Technology approach (SCOT) by Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, introducing the reader to its initial formulation (1984), and to the subsequent extensions – and sometimes reformulations – elaborated in more than 30 year of empirical research. It first clarifies how the Empirical Programme of Relativism...

Based on several rounds of academic interview and conversations with Trevor Pinch, the book introduces the reader to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular to the social constructionist approach to science, technology and sound. Through the lenses of Pinch’s lifetime work, STS students, and scholars in fields dealing w...

The topic “Politics, Civil Society and Participation” is dedicated to the fundamental question: How do media and communications practices within European cultures change with their environment? This volume consists of the intellectual work of the 2015 European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School, organized in cooperation with the Europea...

Media studies scholars are invited today to address the pervasive mediation of contemporary cities, together with researchers from human geography, urban studies, science and technology studies, and mobility studies. Current studies of people’s uses of media in urban space, in particular, could play a central role in shedding light on the mediatedn...

This introduction to the special section on methods and methodologies for urban communication research discusses major approaches to conceptualizing and researching the relationship between cities and communication. We underline the increasing significance of scholarship on the various ways in which city dwellers relate to each other and their urba...

Teaching the ethnographic approach is a challenging effort in higher education due to the increasing time constraints that characterize current academia. A debate about how to teach ethnography is therefore particularly urgent. As a contribution to foster this debate, this article presents and discusses a practical exercise, irst tested at the SuSo...

Italian youth subcultures in the ‘80s are uncharted waters for Italian academia: yet, as local appropriations of symbolic resources circulating at a transnational level, they present specificities that would be worth a definitely more sustained attention. The proposed contribution draws on the case of an harsh protest against the Italian post-punk...

Within Urban Media Studies, current research on media practices in urban space is by and large informed by a phenomenological conceptualization of space directly derived from traditional audience studies of the 1990s. This conceptualization has as its linchpin the distinction between space as abstract location, and place as space endowed with symbo...

Starting from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, media – both mainstream and independent - have devoted to British spectacular youth subcultures (Hebdige 1979) a sporadic but persistent attention, defining through representations sort of “subcultural canons” circulating at a transnational level, and appropriated and enacted at different times in differe...

80s’ Italian Goth subculture (known in Italy as “Dark”) represented the local appropriation, re-interpretation and enactment of an assemblage of symbolic resources (lifestyle models, music, fashion and style, art, literature, cinema) derived principally from the British underground scene, and intercepted mainly through mainstream and independent me...

Se in ambito accademico anglosassone le subculture giovanili godono di un'attenzione sistematica, nel nostro Paese sono praticamente inesplorate. Meriterebbero però una considerazione diversa poiché dicono molto del nostro contesto sociale e politico.

1. Le Reti si fanno socievoli Il campo di osservazione per chi ha interessi di ricerca circa il rapporto tra individuo e società richiede, oggi, di tenere conto di una trasformazione della realtà della comunicazione in cui ambienti offline e online si trovano ad essere sempre più strettamente co-implicati e in cui le forme possibili assunte dalla c...

Since 2012, the authors have been structuring two social sciences courses at the Catholic University of Milan around the practice of building software based on MIT Experience Lab's OpenLOCAST mapping engine. During those courses, social phenomena and theories are discussed and analyzed (and often discovered) as they became pertinent in the process...

Starting from the middle of the twentieth century human geography has allowed social sciences to escape the prison of Euclidean, abstract space. In that prison, social actors performed within an empty, static container known as “space,” which was more or less a background to their actions. This liberation had many fathers. We could quote Henri Lefe...

The paper examines the role of media in the processes of the production of urban space in the case of Paolo Sarpi, a central neighborhood of Milan that is characterized by long–standing spatial conflicts between the residents and the Chinese migrants. The purpose of this complex case study is to highlight the many roles played by media in the proce...

This article deals with the media-related practices enacted by social actors during urban conflict. Its theoretical objective is to stress the need for audience studies to focus on social actors’ concrete practices and, consequently, to switch from essentialist notions of ‘audiences’ to ‘audiencing’ as a practice. This makes it necessary to build t...

The notion of “canon” within transmedial universes has a problematic nature, which is reflected in the literature about fandom. The imprecision is due in no small part to the lack of a model regarding its workings and nature. To this end, we propose a model based on the spatialization of the structure of transmedia universes in term of centre/perip...

This essay moves from a recognition of the role played by subcultures related to magic and occult on the pro-cess of social shaping of the Internet, and then propose a detailed case study on how the network is reshaping the forms of magical knowledge. In particular, the paper addresses the production and sharing practices of the belief system typic...

In April 22, 2007, for the first time in European history, a full-scale riot opposed a Chinese migrant community (the Chinese community of Milan) to the city and state police of the hosting context. This shocking event triggered, on both sides, an intense discursive effort to give a meaning to the facts: an effort that implied a re-writing of the r...