Carla Panico’s research while affiliated with University of Coimbra and other places

Preparedness is an anticipatory approach developed in the military and health sectors in response to unforeseen and unforeseeable crises and emergencies. It has recently entered the debate over the resilience and sustainability of European food systems. The paper seeks to shed light on the implications of the European Union's adoption of preparedness in its food security policy, particularly focusing on the preparatory phase and the early activity the European Food Security Crisis Preparedness and Response Mechanism (EFSCM), a consultative body launched by the European Commission in 2021. Through an analysis of documents and meeting minutes, we illustrate how debates on implementing preparedness are influenced by conflicting sociotechnical imaginaries of sustainable food security. Results show that the EU's shift towards preparedness combines elements of continuity and novelty in its food policy. Continuity concerns the acknowledged need to deal with growing turbulence and unpredictability affecting food systems. Novelty involves attempts at building bridges between diverging imaginaries of sustainable food security to address both short-term and long-term challenges to food security. Also new is the shift to a ‘management,’ as opposed to a ‘problem-solving,’ outlook on crisis and emergency.

Como Fox e Alldred (2020) consideram, o dualismo Cultura / Natureza forneceu aos filósofos, cientistas e cientistas sociais pós-iluministas uma maneira elegante de estabelecer limites para as respectivas preocupações das ciências sociais e naturais (ver também Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Fullagar et al., 2019). Este dualismo tem permitido a criação de distinções entre corpos e modos de estar no mundo “modernos” (leia-se “civilizados”) e “tradicionais” (leia-se “primitivos”). No entanto, quando questões pertencentes à incorporação do social são exploradas criticamente, a influência sobre o bem-estar do entorno construído, as transições climáticas e a pandemia de Covid-19 em curso começam a problematizar tais formas, como é argumentado nas últimas três décadas por autores com perspectivas feministas, pós-humanas, novo-materialistas e político-ecológicas, entre outras. Dando continuidade a um diálogo permanente iniciado em 2018 entre acadêmicos e ativistas da América Latina e Europa, organizamos o seminário online “Re-ligando o nexo natureza-cultura-corpo: práticas e epistemologias”. O evento virtual desenvolvido em duas partes explorou como os territórios inter-relacionados de saúde, atividade física e educação podem ser repensados a partir de perspectivas que desestabilizam as fronteiras ontológicas estabelecidas entre natureza, cultura e corpo, e suas possíveis articulações. Este artigo é a transcrição da segunda sessão, denominada “Cartografias do corpo em tempos de pandemia”, e apresenta os diálogos entre Alice del Gabbo, Carla Panico, Gianluca De Fazio, Alexandre Fernandez Vaz e Eduardo Galak, pesquisadores da Itália, Portugal, Brasil e Argentina. Palavras-chave: Corpo; COVID-19; Educação; Atividade física; Cultura.

This chapter aims to contribute to a deconstruction of public discourses on, and iconographies of, race and whiteness in Italy, through an analysis of the Italian white normative imaginary of disembarkations in mainstream media and political discourses (2015–2019). It focuses on both securitarian and hegemonic humanitarian narratives, paying particular attention to the mediatisation of the figure of Carola Rackete, a ship of the German NGO “Sea-Watch” who, in 2019, violated the ban imposed on Italian ports and landed forty-two migrants. Described as a criminal in securitarian public and media discourses, Rackete was instead represented by hegemonic anti-racist humanitarianism through the colonial iconograpy of the white saviour. In order to unpack the symbolic implications of such visual narratives, the chapter applies a critical discourse analysis to newsmedia, photojournalism and cinema. Our analysis is supported by interviews with journalists, activists, film-makers and artists conducted for the project “(De)Othering: deconstructing Risk and Otherness in Media Narratives” (2018–2021).KeywordsWhite saviourCarola RacketeCritical race theoryMigrantsItalyMediterranean

The purpose of this article is to inquiry nationalistic populism in Italy, using an intersectional perspective - feminist and postcolonial - and proposing some possible articulations between feminist and racial struggles as a response to the contemporary advance of the racist and misogynist far-right. Using the theoretical frame of Critical Studies on Whiteness (Giuliani 2013), the hypothesis is that this specific articulation of racism and sexism represents the basis of affirmation of alt right hegemony in contemporary Italy – where the political and cultural context is characterized by a capillary diffusion of racial, misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic feelings. The text focuses on the emotional dimension of nationalist populism (Ahmed 2004): this theoretical framework is necessary for the analysis of the history of Italian nationalism as a phenomenon based on the obsession with the production and maintenance of the whiteness of the Italian people (Petrovich Njegosh 2012). The last part of the present paper is dedicated to the examples of articulation between feminist and racial/postcolonial struggles in contemporary Italy, focusing on the case of the feminist “vandalization” of colonialist monuments, i.e., the statue of Indro Montanelli in Milan, on the 8th of March 2019 (Panico 2019).

During the protests that occurred in Bristol in June 2020, in the name of Black Lives Matter, the statue of the slave-owner Edward Colston was pulled down by protestors and thrown into the river Avon. A week later, in Milan, the statue of the journalist Indro Montanelli was spray-painted with the words "racist" and "rapist" due to his sexual relationship with an Eritrean child-bride he bought in the 1930s while fighting as a camicia nera (black shirt) for Mussolini. These two acts caused heated debates on both mainstream/traditional media and social media, producing that hybridisation of culture theorised by Henry Jenkins. As feminist scholars, we were directly involved in these debates as we publicly shared some critical reflections on the use of monuments in connection with race, gender and colonialism in Italy. Using collaborative autoethnographic approaches and thematic analysis, we discuss our own experiences within a wider investigation, concerning Italy and the UK, on the use of social media (Twitter and Facebook) as tools that shape specific forms of public memory at the expense of others. Yet, drawing from Linda Alcoff's "epistemologies of ignorance" and Charles Mills' "white ignorance," we also highlight the importance of counter-memories and practices of decolonisation of public spaces in order to challenge hegemonic forms of white amnesia.

The so-called ‘urban social movements’ and ‘right to a city’ initiatives are becoming increasingly important subjects for researchers representing various disciplines: sociologists, social geographers, urban planners. While existing analyses suggest the universal character of both phenomena, the authors often point out their local focus as one of the main characteristics. There is no doubt that in Europe, particularly in the southern and eastern part of the continent, urban social movements have become one of the key actors of social change (Jacobsson 2016; Pixova 2018; Jezierska, Polanska 2018; Domaradzka 2018; Dolenec, Doolan, Tmmasevic 2017).

This text aims to propose a reflection on the phenomenon of so-called touristification within the geographical area of Southern Europe concerning two points: how the processes of production of space that go under this name can be placed inside of the framework of the neo-extractive processes and how social movements against tourism may eventually resonate with the perspective of political ecology. The hypothesis is that this typology of accumulation processes responds to certain colonial rationality of capitalist exploitation within a specific area of the Global North – Southern Europe – starting from the global economic crisis of 2008, which I assume as a historical period characterized by specific forms of production of space (Lefebvre 1974) and specific social movements – the anti-tourism movements and the environmental struggles.