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The paper focuses on the issues of merit, explored in its complex polysemy, meritocracy, and skills, placing them in relation to those of – educational, social, economic, cultural – poverty and social disadvantage, which afflict, with considerable aggravation especially in the era of Sars-Cov-2 pandemic, even Italy. The essay consists of three paragraphs. In the first two, a reference framework is outlined, on the one hand relating to the polysemic concepts of merit, and meritocracy; on the other, to the situation of poverty and social inequalities in Italy. The third paragraph, which represents the heart of the paper, is linked to the abovementioned frameworks: it highlights the key role that a widespread, accessible, and high-quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) play, both in supporting children’s development, both promoting a democratic and inclusive society; a society characterized by effective “merit dynamics”, open to all, so as to promote skills development and, above all, social ascent and redemption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of DIS - Dislessia, Discalculia & Disturbi di Attenzione is the property of Edizioni Centro Studi Erickson SpA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper stems from some questions regarding the 'digital boom' that involved Culture since the COVID-19 pandemic. What scenarios will open up for cultural institutions once the pandemic crisis is over? While on the one hand now days the ancient art now better know the importance of storytelling, on the other hand it is increasingly crucial to involve users in the co-creation of the digital cultural heritage. Among the strategies of public engagement, I experimented a participatory storytelling process at the "Museo etnografico della vita popolare di Tricase", which contributes to enlivening the reality of the Ethnographic Museum of Popular Life in a peripheral area of Southern Italy, Tricase. The aim is to implement the guidelines of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Property and the Council of Europe's Faro Convention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper stems from the «Progetto Pilota Natalità» in the province of Modena of the Emilia-Romagna region, Italy. Run between 2019 and 2021, the project introduces new evidence related to family policies in the Province of Modena. Specifically, we integrate primary qualitative firm-level evidence gathered during the Covid-19 pandemic with data on the voluntary organizations operating in the Italian third sector obtained just before the Covid-19 outbreak. We provide meaningful insights at the intersection of the public, the private and the voluntary sectors, while setting some guidelines to move forward in the design and implementation of family policies that are sensible across the territory. The study is interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and, as a result, is mainly centered around two themes: (1) the processes involved in the territorialization of public policy, particularly family policies, that entail local collective action levers and bottom-up resilience for the application of national policies; (2) the potential of these policies in terms of social innovation, understood as the joint design of a social infrastructure within a value allocation process between the actors involved, given certain time and space aspects. The paper explores the dimensionality of social innovation through the emergence and the scaling up of innovative processes as a result of devolved governance from national and EU levels to the local level, which gives precisely the framework of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islam in Italy is highly discussed but not significantly institutionalized. Polemics about its presence (and anti-multiculturalism in general) have often preceded any real multicultural politics, and the recognition of religious minorities arrived with immigration, such as Islam. The Covid pandemics has made visible one of the aspects of the necessary de facto acknowledgement of the presence of Islam: the problem of Muslim cemeteries, up to that moment avoided or postponed as much as possible by local municipalities, with few exceptions. As an outcome of an empirical research on Muslim in Italy during the pandemics, the paper aims to explore the different attitudes of Muslims families and communities facing the problem of being buried in the municipality they lived in, instead of repatriating the bodies as it was the most common procedure until Covid. The research shows the attempt of Muslims to minimize friction with Italian norms and institutions, through a re-interpretation of the symbolic border between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the idea of purity, contamination and separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of L'Idomeneo is the property of Salento University Publishing, Dipartimento di Beni Culturali and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Rivista Italiana di Educazione Familiare is the property of Firenze University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper examines the available data on the book market and on reading behaviors in Italy during 2020, also taking into account the international landscape and relevant figures on other cultural consumptions, with the aim of proposing some interpretative hypotheses and analyzing the main trends. As often happened in the past, once again the real data have disproved some forecasts. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been different in different stages of the emergency. In the first weeks of lockdown, despite the increase of free time at home, the propensity to read does not seem to have grown significantly, while the sales figures, due to the bookstores' closures, led to fears of a collapse in consumption. Things went differently during the second wave, with a strong recovery of the book market: the year even closed with an increase in sales value compared to 2019. However, the radical transformations that are taking place in the relative weight of different sales channels are worrying, with a significant shift from 'physical' bookstores towards e-commerce, where Amazon holds a share of over 80%. Among the policies implemented in recent years to support demand and to promote reading, the '18-yearold bonus' proved to be highly effective: between 2016 and 2019 it allowed a large share of the young people who had moved away from reading in the previous years, to return among the ranks of readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Giornale di Medicina Militare is the property of Difesa Servizi S.p.A. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of L'Infermiere is the property of IPASVI - Italian Nursing Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Related to the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-June 2020), some recent studies on the application of content analysis of geolocalized tweets (Bashar et alii 2020, Punziano et alii 2020) have demonstrated the negative relation between the Coronavirus spread (with Northern Italy most affected) and the polarity of social narratives about the pandemic. In brief, the «resilient» social narrative of the most impacted regions has corresponded to a negative and worried emergency narrative of the less affected regions. In relation to epidemiological data, the second phase of the pandemic (also referred to as the «second wave», in autumn 2020) has been very different from the first (ISSa 2020). The severity of emergency, without considering questions about the reliability of the first wave data (Istat 2020a), has been more relevant and homogeneous across Italy. The study questions whether there are differences between the geography of contagion and that of the narrative. Given the increasingly homogeneous spread of the virus, the assumption has been that the digital arena also has ended up showing a narrative more united on negative sentiments. The issue is addressed by analyzing a corpus of geolocalized tweets, extracted in the period from the new October lockdown to the partial and fragmented pre-Christmas reopenings in 2020. Following the application of a model combining text mining and GIS analysis, the most recurrent themes in social discourse on Twitter were mapped. This geography of emerging social narratives (COVID-Issues) compared with the geography of contagion spread (COVID-Spread) and the norms (COVID-Measures) allowed to detect the trend in the relationship of these three dimensions during the second emergence from COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coronavirus pandemic that has brought Italy (like many other countries) to its knees brings to the surface in a brutal way the criticality of the health policy choices taken by the government in the last thirty years, guided by the principle of subordination of the quality of care to cost efficiency. The priority has been to maximize profit by sacrificing the quality of care and health services. All this forces us to redefine the terms and categories with which we read and interpret today the issues related to the physical and mental health of citizens and the policies that govern it. Starting from this, the aim of this article is to reflect on the limits of contemporary health policies and the urgency of rethinking them in terms of a greater capacity to reconcile people's needs with a better use of public resources. To this end, the article will focus on bottom-up health policy practices that try to guarantee, at the same time, the quality of care and a better use of health spending, through the analysis of the experience of the Solaris association in Rome working in the field of mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]