RISULTATI RICERCA

Genetics and predictive tests are changing breast cancer prevention, both in terms of subjective experience and risk reducing practices. The aim of the article is to address two main research questions: What does the genetic information mean for subjects? How does prevention and risk-reducing practice change in relation to genetic information? Through qualitative research on breast cancer experience conducted in Italy at the National Cancer Institute of Rome, it was possible to answer these questions by including women who received a genetic response for the BRCA mutation. What emerges is that the genetic information shapes risk-reducing prac-tice, fostering genetic responsibilities within the family. This seems to encourage woman to perceive radical risk-reducing strategies such, as a mastectomy or oophorectomy, as the main - and often mandatory - solution to face breast cancer risk thereby underestimating the health risks and psychological burden involved in preventive surgery.

Our hypertechnological civilization, obsessed with attempting to control and predict every event and every aspect of our lives, has not yet understood that emergency is a connotative element of complexity and of the complex systems that we call "life". This means that emer-gency, like error, is an intrinsic part of our lives and can never be predicted, prevented or managed, much less eliminated. Seeking solutions by delegating carte blanche to technology, stak-ing all on know-how, speed and simulation, is the "great mistake" of today’s digitalized society and of its educational institutions. In dealing with emergency, rather than rationalizing our inadequacies and those of our authorities and experts by using the age-old metaphor "black swan" (Taleb, 2007; 2012), students and teachers alike need to be empowered to inhabit complexity, to expect unpredictability, and to tackle emergency through creativity and self-organization, in order to be able to fully comprehend how emergency can become emergence.

This essay aims to verify the existing combination of low levels of sustainable peace and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The hypothesis we want to support is that the aforementioned panemic wouldn’t have become a world crisis had there been greater investments in social and environmental issues, which are the sources of sustainable peace. The applied methodology is preceded by a brief description of the different meanings of and the interdependencies between sustainable development and peace, a reflection on the main reports, both national (Italian Min-istry of Health, Italian National Statistical Institute) and international (UN, UNPD, IMF, WHO, IEP) and a quantitative supplementary analysis of their guidelines insofar as pandemic-related sustainability and sustainable peace are concerned. Our goal is to prove how much needed and no longer deferrable is a reading able to reconcile factors that are different from each other when it comes to their nature and content. Such factors are environmental pollution, climate change, cultural and structural violence, inequalities within individual States and be-tween States.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, young people had a peculiar position in Italian public and institutional discourses. On the one hand, their complex living conditions nourished preoccu-pations and calls for intervention to save an "endangered" social group. On the other hand, young people’s behaviours were constantly placed under scrutiny as potentially dangerous for themselves and society. Through an analysis of public and institutional discourses on youth and youth policies elaborated during the pandemic, the article analyses the interplay of these competing narratives in political and policy choices during the Covid-19 emergency exploring how young people’s (un)deservingness has been framed. In doing so, the article asks what understanding of youth sustains recent institutional choices in terms of resources distribution and what institutions have learnt on (and from) young people during the pandemic.

The aim of this study is to offer a sociological communication’s reflection in calamity society, divided into two closely integrated and mutually consequential parts. The first part will consid-er why a sociological approach to cyclical disasters is appropriate, and the possible application of this approach will then be outlined, leading us to the second section of this work. The sec-ond part of the essay dwells on issues concerning risk communication, considering that communicative processes play a priority role in the selection of risks, through a slow process of social construction that begins with what Beck calls the staging of risk through a metamorphic process. In this context, a decisive role is played by communication, intended here as a phenomenon affecting the risk management process.

In 1942 P. Sorokin published his noteworthy book "Man and Society in Calamity" providing 18 traits from psycho-social to macro, via micro and meso of the impact of calamities on ma and society. This paper has a twofold goal of sociological theory and policy modeling which is important to be linked strategically as research determines policy which determines politics. The first objective is to briefly present Sorokin’s traits showing their multidimensional map and very briefly debating how this map is still valid in terms of procedural preparedness in the case of calamities which is not perfect but viable enough to meaningfully downsize the risk of media creation of panic through the use of granfaloon and further manipulation tools. The second objective regards policy modeling and global governance of calamities and its scale of jurisdiction, the possibility of a multilevel coordinated policy or the drift towards fragmented and contingent localization of non protagonist organization which for whatever reason (power, money etc.) and want to create a granfaloon, a trompe d’oeil and an unending threat or enemy to scare the masses and public opinion by pretending that they, the non protagonists - are the protagonists to keep the foe at bay. On these basis, this paper deals with the risks of misleading interpretation of calamities often depending on a lack of preparedness and/or by a strong will to manipulate facts politically.

This paper discusses the role that sociological reflection can play in learning and improving knowledge in the field of mental health care. Two different positions within sociology will be discussed. The first one, taken from a constructionist perspective, interprets the role of sociology as a critical instance and highlights how the adoption of rigid formal protocols in psychiatry has hindered and endangered the autonomy and necessary discretion of clinicians at the moment of diagnosis. The second position, which takes an ethnomethodological point of view, holds instead that it is pointless to focus on formal protocols because concrete diagnostic practice consists of other procedures, not at all comparable to the official ones described by the DSM. For ethnomethodology, the contribution of sociology is not to add sociological knowledge to psychiatric knowledge, but to make the real resources and competences of clinical work explicit.

After some time since the onset of the Covid19 pandemic, we believe it is now possible to reflect on how the global response to the worldwide spread of the virus has been organized, and at the same time reflect on the emergency approach that has characterized the responses on the health front but also the public communication of the same pandemic. The hypothesis around which we work is that the term of emergency itself is not appropriate except to designate a sit-uation that is strictly related to a reductionist approach to understanding and explaining phenomena. An event becomes an emergency only if we reason in terms of a linear explanation, avoiding paying attention to the real complexity of the phenomena, with a comprehensive look at systemic interrelationships. In this perspective, Horton correctly proposed the term syndemic to characterize the set of events related to Covid19 (Horton, 2020). Because the unexpected, which is experienced and managed as an emergency, arises from an obvious interpretative error if the problem is not addressed with a systemic logic. And it can perhaps also be hypothe-sized that as such - that is, as unexpected and emerging - any phenomenon legitimizes proce-dural and communicative errors, thus exonerating in some way whoever is responsible for facing them.

This essay aims at investigating what role capitalism, in its ideal-typical logic, plays in times of pandemic crisis. The research hypothesis consists in abandoning a one-sided idea of capital-ism, which is the dominant one in the neoliberal version, to recover, instead, that of “creative destruction”, as the most constitutive logic of the phenomenon from its origins and also the most promising for scientifically explaining the relationship between capitalism and pandem-ics. Attempts will be made to demonstrate the scientific inconsistency of a reading that rigidly and dogmatically sets antithetical interpretations of capitalism against each other, and to con-struct, instead, one that combines the possibility of divergences. Finally, the question will arise as to what implications can be drawn from this incidence of the logic of creative destruction in capitalism and whether this is such as to impose deterministic results, as well as supposedly at the level of common sense or generalization, or whether there is still room for manoeuvre and guidance by science and politics in particular.

There has been no challenge, crisis or disaster in human history that has not left behind it ben-eficial results and accomplishments that would otherwise not have been possible. Whether a crisis continues to persist and remain a source of grief, or is overcome successfully and even converted into an opportunity depends on how we respond to it. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life around the world for nearly three years. As we pick ourselves up and learn our lessons, this is the best time to use the pressure of the challenge to discard encrusted struc-tures and rigid mindsets, reinvent ourselves, and usher in a new paradigm of thought that results in a new paradigm of social development and human security. This paper studies the pos-itive and negative developments in the past three years and posits that deep and creative thinking, a future-ready education for our youth and a global, values-based leadership for the 21st century will support humanity in this endeavour.