1) Latour, B. Non siamo mai stati moderni, eléuthera, 2009, capitoli 2 e 3.
2) Bontempi, M. Dalla temporalità dei moderni alle aspettative di futuro nell’Antropocene. Un itinerario teorico attraverso Koselleck, Latour e Beckert in smp - SOCIETÀMUTAMENTOPOLITICA vol. 10, 2019 (scaricabile dalla pagina moodle del corso).
3) Bontempi, M. La storicità del futuro tra politica, capitalismo e natura, in Bontempi M. – D’Andrea – D. Mannori L. (a cura di) Pensare la politica. Una ricognizione interdisciplinare, il Mulino, 2020, pp. 49-66 (scaricabile dalla pagina moodle del corso).
4) Michel Callon, Sociologia dell’attore-rete in Akrich M., Callon M., Latour B., Sociologie de la traduction. Textes fondateurs, Paris, Les Presses MINES, 2006, pp. 267-276 (scaricabile dalla pagina moodle del corso).
5) Croce M., Bruno Latour. Irriduzionismo, Attante, Ibridi, Gaia, DeriveApprodi, 2020, capp. 2, 4 e 5.
6) Latour, B. La sfida di Gaia. Il nuovo regime climatico, Meltemi, 2018.
7) Latour, B. L’agency al tempo dell’Antropocene, in Essere di questa terra. Guerra e pace al tempo dei conflitti ecologici, (a cura di N. Manghi), Rosenberg & Sellier, 2019, pp. 97-120. (scaricabile dalla pagina moodle del corso)
8) Vignoli, D., Bazzani, G., Guetto, R., Minello, A., & Pirani, E. (2020). Uncertainty and Narratives of the Future: A Theoretical Framework for Contemporary Fertility. In Analyzing contemporary fertility (pp. 25-47). Springer, Cham.
9) Vignoli, D., Guetto, R., Bazzani, G., Pirani, E., & Minello, A. (2020). A reflection on economic uncertainty and fertility in Europe: The Narrative Framework. Genus, 76(1), 1-27.
10) Giacomo Bazzani (2021). Digital money for sustainable communities: the Sardex Case. In Andrea Maurer (ed) Handbook of Economic Sociology of the XXI Century. London: Springer.
11) Simpson, B., & Willer, R. (2015). Beyond altruism: Sociological foundations of cooperation and prosocial behavior. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 43-63.
12) Baldassarri, D. (2015). Cooperative networks: Altruism, group solidarity, reciprocity, and sanctioning in Ugandan producer organizations. American Journal of Sociology, 121(2), 355-395.
13) Baldassarri, D. (2020). Market integration accounts for local variation in generalized altruism in a nationwide lost-letter experiment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(6), 2858-2863.
Learning Objectives
Knowledge and understanding:
Knowledge of the sociological vocabulary relating to the topics studied
Knowledge of the sociological concepts used and their definitions
Understanding of the main sociological theories explaining the social phenomena under study.
Prerequisites
none
Teaching Methods
- Frontal teaching
- Flipped class
- Writing a paper
Type of Assessment
Oral exam and writing a paper
Course program
The course is focused on some theoretical aspects involved in the transformations related to the crisis of the modern separation of nature and society. In particular, some lectures will be devoted to the presentation and discussion of some concepts of Actor-Network Theory, specifically from works of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, which offer a perspective of analysis and critique on the presuppositions of the distinctions of subject and object, of natural and social and of human and non-human, peculiar to the modern world. Specific attention will be paid to two fundamental dimensions of the social order: on the one hand, the relationship between the assumptions of the modern distinctions mentioned above and the shape of temporality and expectations of the future; on the other hand, the connection between modern distinctions and the conceptualisation of social ties and social solidarity.
Contemporary transformations in expectations of the future and practices of social solidarity and the implications of these transformations for sociological theory and empirical research will be the subject of the major part of the course lectures, first through a framing in the perspective of actor-network theory and then through the analysis of emerging research perspectives on these issues.
With regard to expectations of the future, sociology, which since its origins has attributed to the past a predominant role over the present in the explanation of social phenomena, is now urged to develop theoretical and research perspectives on the study of expectations, utopias and social imaginaries, that is, aspects that are primarily anchored in the future. Recently, the first systematic sociological theories on the relationship between future and social change have been developed around the idea of imagined futures, and the conceptual apparatus has also been refined to capture the different levels of social influence of the expected future. The course will present some of these concepts useful for the study of empirical phenomena, in particular those of expectations, imaginaries and narratives of the future and their possible operationalisation through qualitative, quantitative and experimental methods.
Regarding the transformations of social solidarity, contemporary changes raise wide-ranging questions. How do European citizens react to migrants knocking on Europe's doors trying to get in? How can the populations of rich countries cope with the ongoing climate change, given that its effects fall mainly on future generations but its mitigation requires a change in current lifestyles? There are different possible answers to these questions that have more or less selfish, cooperative or altruistic characteristics. The current panorama of studies on the subject is particularly wide-ranging, articulated and of central interest for the social change underway. Globalisation, in fact, confronts society with problems that call for new and increasingly advanced forms of solidarity and pro-social behaviour, which tend to shift the scope of these social phenomena from direct reciprocity (present, for example, in neighbourhood solidarity) to that of pure altruism, albeit mediated by possible reputational and status effects (as in the case of behaviour aimed at reducing climate-changing gas emissions or activism in welcoming migrants).
The course will introduce the sociological foundations of this field of study and present three case studies: a) the effects of Sardex currency on prosocial behaviour, b) the capacity for cooperation among farmers in rural Uganda in different interaction patterns and c) the presence of altruism in different contexts through a lost-letter experiment.