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This article uses my long-term ethnography inside Slow Food's international headquarters in Italy, as well as inside the French association, in order to analyse the place that Slow Food occupies in France and its capacity to oppose the industrial food system. International association, non-profit organisation, and economic enterprise, negotiating with a large spectrum of political and economic actors, Slow Food is a political and economic object. The leaders of Slow Food have always considered France as the country of gastronomy, valuing French food culture highly from the first years of the association. But, paradoxically, in France the movement has never really grown. What accounts for this marginal position? What does this particular case of 'food activism' elucidate about the contradictions of the French food system? Using an anthropological perspective and methodology, and paying attention to the different points of view of people involved inside the movement, I analyse the ambivalent relationship between its French branch and the international one, highlighting their reciprocal misunderstandings. Finally, I explore the relationships that Slow Food members – and especially producers – have established with other associations and initiatives, such as the AMAPs (Association pour le maintien de l'agriculture paysanne). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we will explore the way in which different agents appropriate and use heritage to compete in specific power scenarios. We approach heritage discourses and practices as defining specific political arenas within which power relations are reconfigured. The protection of spaces and places as well as the processes of patrimonialisation that take place inside specific localities give rise to the emergence of new ways of exercising power. We will examine two ethnographic cases from South European mountain areas: the Parc National des Écrins in the French Alps and a Romanesque church in the Catalan Pyrenees. An analysis of both the protected area and the constructed heritage will enable us to focus on heritage as being produced, identified and valued within specific logics and value systems. We examine the dynamics that heritage and heritage policies produce in each context as well as the interest they promote. Heritage both organises different fields of forces and is appropriated by politicians, experts, and economic actors. We will discuss the entanglements, forces and dynamics that are activated and played out as a result of heritage processes in the larger process of contemporary political transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions the notion of 'local' as applied to food provisioning and its social, spatial and political dimensions. The aim is to understand how the different actors involved in local and 'localized' food circuits think, use and apply this notion. By following the diverse representations of locality – from the actors' discourses to urban planning texts – and the practices that implement them, the authors (an anthropologist, a geographer and an urban planner) examine the variability of this notion in order to analyze the way it is appropriated and reconfigured according to the arena in which it is mobilized. This text also aims to reflect on the limits and contributions of a multidisciplinary approach to these issues. The challenge is to show that the summing of these three approaches brings out new elements that do not emerge from each individual analysis. The notion of 'local' is part of an administrative, spatial and ideological reality that is being constantly recomposed according to political, social and economic processes. Questioning this notion by involving three dimensions and three disciplines, enables our reflection to avoid the impasses of scientific literature in which the meaning of what is local seems to be self-evident while remaining fixed in specific disciplinary frameworks, and to show its shifting nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between unrest and eruption at calderas is still poorly understood. Aso caldera, Japan, shows minor episodic phreatomagmatic eruptions associated with steady subsidence. We analyse the deformation of Aso using SAR images from 1993 to 2011 and compare it with the eruptive activity. Although the dataset suffers from limitations (e.g. atmospheric effects, coherence loss, low signal-to-noise ratio), we observe a steady subsidence signal from 1996 to 1998, which suggests an overall contraction of a magmatic source below the caldera centre, from 4 to 5 km depth. We propose that the observed contraction may have been induced by the release of the magmatic fluids feeding the eruptions. If confirmed by further data, this hypothesis suggests that degassing processes play a crucial role in triggering minor eruptions within open conduit calderas, such as at Aso. Our study underlines the importance of defining any eruptive potential also from deflating magmatic systems with open conduit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As largely known the Neapolitan Volcanic District, consisting on Campi Flegrei caldera, Mt. Vesuvius and Ischia island, is potentially one of the most dangerous worldwide because of the high density of inhabithants. Currently, Campi Flegrei is at the "yellow" alert level according to the Emergency Plan issued by the Italian Civil Protection Department. Several activities were carried out by the INGV Remote Sensing group and are still ongoing to guarantee a continuous monitoring of such volcanic areas by satellite data. In particular, we focused our analysis on surface deformations and temperature variations due to volcanic inflation/deflation and magma recharging. Surface deformation rate maps and time series are estimated by X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data acquired by Cosmo-SkyMed (CSK) missions along both ascending and descending orbits and processed by the Interferometric Point Target Analysis (IPTA) approach. Further perspectives in this sense concern the development of semi-authomatic procedures for optimizing data processing and computational burden. In addition to the Supersite space-borne data provision, based on the acquisition plans and data access policies of the space agencies (ASI, ESA, DLR, JAXA, CSA) it would be desiderable to increase the available dataset (both in the number and the acquisition modes) to improve the reliability of the estimations. On the other hand, temperature maps are obtained by processing thermal channels of nighttime acquisition of optical satellite data (ASTER and TIRS Landsat8). These data have an high spatial resolution (90 m for ASTER and 100m for Landsat8), offering the capability to detect thermal signatures especially analysing the nighttime data. The choice to process only nighttime satellite data is due to the absence of the solar contamination and the data more clearly shows the temperature difference between hottest areas (Solfatara di Pozzuoli and Vesuvio crater) and the surroundings. The surface temperatures are obtained by processing the data at sensor radiance acquired by ASTER - Landsat8 and removing the atmospheric effects. The 100 m resolution TIRS L8 data are re-sampled to correspond to the ASTER 90m spatial dimensions by using the nearest neighbor resampling method, in order to have the same spatial pixel resolution for all data.The goal for the future is to correlate the deformation trend and the temperature variations thus evaluating an associated hazard level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]