Alberta Giorgi

University of Bergamo | UNIBG

I processi di transnazionalizzazione e di flessibilizzazione/precarizzazione del lavoro contribuiscono a riconfigurare gli attributi di cittadinanza formale e le pratiche di cittadinanza materiale delle nuove generazioni, trasformando in modo radicale il rapporto tra individui, lavoro, territorio e diritti. Le implicazioni sul piano della cittadina...

En Italie, les débats sur le rapport entre religion et école sont nombreux et récurrents, que ce soit sur les cantines scolaires, les contenus et les illustrations à caractère religieux dans les manuels scolaires, etc. Le débat principal porte sur l’enseignement de la religion à l’école, un thème qui réapparaît régulièrement dans l’histoire de l’It...

Recent research exploring the relationships between gender and populism has shown that populist parties, mainly right-wing, usually do not advance a women-friendly agenda and do not provide women-favorable environments. Nevertheless, concerns about women’s rights and combating violence against women are gaining space within populist discourse. In t...

“Religious freedom” has many different meanings, and its social perceptions vary depending on different factors, including different understandings of the role of religion in society. In this paper, we contribute to the analysis of the intersections between the institutional definitions and the social perceptions by comparatively analyzing the prac...

‘Coronavirus could kill off populism’ (Financial Times June 20, 2020), ‘Beware a new wave of populism, born out of coronavirus-induced economic inequity’ (The Guardian, April 18, 2020), ‘Where the Virus Is Growing Most: Countries With “Illiberal Populist” Leaders’ (New York Times, June 2, 2020), ‘How European populists are using coronavirus as a po...

This Special Issue provides diverse multidisciplinary entry points that convey the multi-layered complexity of the interactions between radical right populism, gender issues, and religious questions. It fills a gap in the scholarship dealing with the political and social manifestations of radical right populism. From a theoretical point of view, th...

This chapter explores the relationship between academic freedom, science, and right-wing politics using the example of the recent events around Professor Andrea Pető’s recent publication at Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte which lead to her resignation from the Hungarian Accreditation Committee. It illustrates how illiberal democracies shake th...

For a long time considered a European exception to its spread, populism in Portugal is rapidly recovering lost ground in both cultural and electoral terms. For example, the populist party Chega is increasingly supported by the population, including members of the public sector such as the police, and populism is slowly normalizing in the Portuguese...

Edited collection - Populism&Science

In the Manichaean discourse of the radical-right populist parties, both religion and gender play a role in the discursive process of ‘othering’. At the same time, on some occasions, populist discourse also mobilises Christianity and gender equality against immigrants, which has been interpreted through the frames of hijacking or instrumentalization...

This contribution explores whether and how the populist challenge has affected the discussions around religion in the European Parliament. More specifically, it documents whether the increasing presence of populist actors in the European Parliament has resulted in an increasing attention toward religious matters, or in changes in the frames related...

I metodi creativi sono approcci processuali che prevedono la creazione di artefatti, anche digitali, utili per incorporare pratiche quotidiane e performative nel progetto di ricerca. Essi implicano la validazione di saperi ed esperienze di soggetti situati fuori delle istituzioni accademiche tradizionali e creano processi collaborativi e dialogici...

Il presente contributo pone attenzione a come i simpatizzanti del partito populista della Lega Nord articolino discorsivamente il rapporto tra genere e religione. Dopo un breve inTuadramento degli studi intorno a populismo, genere e religione, e la presentazione del caso studio e dei risultati dell’analisi, nella sezione conclusiva si mette in luce...

Catholic women against Churchsplaining. Catholic women's movements, networks and initiatives have a long history of advocating for an equal role in the Church-especially in the North American world. In recent years, their presence and visibility has been increasing in Europe too, also in relation to a series of initiatives and events, such as the M...

The relatively late legalization of same-sex partnerships in Italy in comparison to other European countries is partly due to the powerful presence of the Vatican within Italy’s borders and its voice in political debates. Although the number of Italians who actively practice the Catholic religion is decreasing, Catholic values are enshrined in hist...

Research shows that, overall, the EU has a positive impact on the respect of religious diversity in the multi-level European system and that religious minorities have a positive attitude toward the EU. This positive, albeit limited, impact may be endangered by the rise of the right-wing populist discourse which, as many scholars have shown, targets...

Scholars describe Global North feminisms as mostly ‘secular’ and often opposing religion. Contemporary feminist intersectional movements seem to offer different approaches able to overcome distances and articulate the role of religion in feminist emancipatory practice. This contribution explores the complex role of religion in intersectional femini...

Methodological literature dealing with the challenges in sampling, recruiting and engaging research participants for qualitative interviews usually assumes that potential informants are informed. But what happens when the potential informants make it clear that they have little to say because under-informed on the topic? This article explores the c...

Introductory article to the book Symposium on Everyday Europe. Social transnationalism in an unsettled continent. Check out the entire journal issue at: http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/paco/issue/view/1724

This paper discusses three challenges that ‘religion’ poses to contemporary feminism, in relation to the assumption of feminist secularity, feminist definitions of individual autonomy and the way in which feminism understands itself as an emancipatory practice. The growing literature on gender and religion sheds light on the multiple intersections...

Italy presents an interesting case for the analysis of the relationships between religion and political parties: for more than 40 years starting from the beginning of its Republican history, the Christian Democratic party (DC) tightly held the government. Despite all its contradictions and complexities, the DC was, in fact, the point of reference f...

Over the last decade, many scholars have explored the thesis of the mediatization of religion proposed by Hjarvard and how mediatization has impacted religious authority. While some scholars have underlined the increasing opportunities for marginalized religious actors to make their voices heard, others have explored how mediatization can also resu...

The workshop aims to explore the complex intersections between extreme-right populism, gender and religion. Together with the rise of extreme-right and the populist discourse, scholarly attention to the topic has been flourishing in the last years. Accurate empirical research and rigorous theorizations built solid literature and nourished the burge...

Italy, which has been defined as a quasi-religious monopoly, is experiencing an increase in religious diversity in the last decades, mainly due to the growing presence of immigration-related religious minorities. As in other countries, in Italy too faith-based as well as secular schools have become a central place for managing religious diversity....

Intersectionality and solidarity are pivotal to the current global feminist wave. In southern Europe, the Ni una menos network was able to gather many feminist groups and organizations under the umbrella issue of the fight against gender violence. In the current populist political climate, the movement stimulated coalitions across inequalities by r...

This article investigates the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Portugal in the aftermath of the economic and financial crisis. Through a focus on the case of Lisbon, we explore how the crisis resulted in increased collaboration between religious organizations and the public administration. The crisis in fact changed the opportunity structure of...

Questo libro parla di religione, e allo stesso tempo non parla solo di religione. L'oggetto del volume riguarda il posto delle religioni di minoranza in Italia sullo sfondo dei processi di cambiamento che caratterizzano le società contemporanee-secolarizzazione, laicizzazione, europeizzazione, immigrazione-e delle tensioni che innescano o mettono i...

The issues related to the role of religion in the public education system have been a public topic for a long time, and related debates have been cyclically revived by specific events. In this contribution, we explore the reasons why Italian grassroots actors do not tend to size up the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) jurisprudence and the pl...

In this contribution, we address the everlasting debate on the definition of religion from a multiscalar perspective. Supranational courts – and, especially, the European Court of Human Rights – gained a major legitimising role in this respect. One may thus expect that religious minorities with uncertain status look at supranational courts as attra...

As many scholars point out, the epistemic form of modern subjectivity (liberal, secular) includes a strong emphasis on individual agency. As a result, religious agencies are often interpreted as ‘defective’ – ascribed to what lies outside the self. When dealing with religious pluralism in European societies, the public and political debates often f...

Mobility represents a powerful factor of change. It redefines the structures of society and stimulates the reorientation of identities, the feelings of belonging and the individual social networks. Indeed, mobility provides chances of life improvement but also brings about new risks and produces new inequalities. The EU represents an extraordinary...

The chapter focuses on the public and political discourse on “migrants” in Europe, which frames the relationship between migrants and trade unions, and offers an overview of the main issues at stake. We develop an original analysis of European citizens’ attitudes towards migrants using ESS data. These data show that hostility towards immigrants is...

This article brings to a conclusion the series of three special sections published in 2015 and 2016 by Religion, State and Society on ‘Religion and local politics in southern Europe’. We set up a research agenda on the interactions between religion and local politics in Southern Europe. In doing so, we focus on the localisation of religion, includi...

This paper provides an introductory review of the literature mapping the gendered analyses of the categories of secularism and secularization from a sociological point of view, with the aim of providing some coordinates and bibliographical references and showing the theoretical and analytical implications of the gendered analyses of secularism in r...

The three articles included in this second special section devoted to the interactions between religion and territorial politics in southern Europe continue the underlying research questions about the multiscalar interactions between religious mobilisation and policymaking, focusing on different denominations and scales of observations. The three a...

The catholic bio-politics, in recent years, addressed a variety of issues. In this contribution I focus specifically on assisted reproduction and stem cell research in order to analyse the Catholic neo-feminist discourse, and the complex interplay of discursive arenas. Namely, I focus the attention on the reconfiguration of religious discourse in t...

This paper provides an introductory review of the literature mapping the gendered analyses of the categories of secularism and secularization from a sociological point of view, with the aim of providing some coordinates and bibliographical references and showing the theoretical and analytical implications of the gendered analyses of secularism in r...

La centralità della religione nella vita pubblica delle società contemporanee è dimostrata, nel caso particolare dell’Italia, dal modo con cui si è articolata e sviluppata la discussione sui temi bioetici (inizio e fine vita, aborto, eutanasia), sui simboli religiosi e i luoghi di culto (con particolare riferimento all’Islam), sui rapporti tra educ...

L’interesse verso il tema “Donne, Religioni, Relazioni di Genere” ha acquisito risonanza soprattutto a partire dalla metà degli anni ’90 in Europa e, più recentemente, anche in Italia, sviluppandosi al di fuori dei confini disciplinari della sociologia della religione e degli studi di genere. Tre fattori hanno contribuito, in particolare, al riemer...

For academic researchers, Europe comes with the job : their intra-European mobility increased in the last decades, and internationalization is the keyword for their careers. On the other side, intra-European mobility also bears difficulties : couples living apart, decrease of permanent positions and frequent relocations, problems in accessing local...

This book is to understand the European political debate about contentious issues framed in terms of religious values by religious and/or secular actors in 21st century, focusing specifically on the Italian case, which, due to its peculiar history and contemporary political landscape, is a paradigmatic case for the study of the relationships betwee...

The invisible politics of religion in southern European territories: preliminary considerations With this issue of Religion, State & Society, we inaugurate a planned series of special sections focusing on the analysis of the political involvement of religious associations and organisations at the local level. Without pre-empting the more substanti...

In this article we focus on how changes in political structure influence religion. Communion and Liberation (CL) is widely known in Italy as a very important Catholic movement whose political power has been significantly increasing in the last 15 years. It is an example of a movement deeply rooted at the local level, where its activities range from...

Negli ultimi anni la crisi economica ha colpito con forza l’intero Sud Europa, esasperando dinamiche di impoverimento e precarizzazione di lungo periodo. In Italia e in Spagna, tra gli altri, si è assistito a mobilitazioni contro la precarietà lavorativa e esistenziale. In questo contributo vengono presi in esame i movimenti contro la precarietà in...

Religion plays an important role in contemporary politics, both as a public and political actor, and as set of values. As a public actor, religion widely participates in the political spheres of European countries. At the same time, both European and non-European societies are experiencing a profound reshaping of their political landscapes. In thes...

For more than the half of its republican history, the Italian political landscape was dominated by the Christian Democrats – a religiously inspired conservative political party. After its collapse, the possibility of creating a new (or renewed) Catholic party has been widely debated. This contribution focuses on how different areas of Italian Catho...

Although the presence of the crucifix in public classrooms and other public offices is an ancient Italian tradition, it was never a political issue until recent times. In the early 2000s, some court cases and other events (first at the national and later also at the European level) turned the public display of the crucifix into a major issue in the...

Comunhão e Liberação (CL) é amplamente reconhecido em Itália como um importante movimento católico, cujo poder político tem crescido de forma significativa nos últimos 15 anos. Caracterizado por uma forte identidade que conjuga tradição e modernidade, o CL tem conseguido ampliar o número dos seus aderentes e a sua presença a nível social, económico...

This contribution focuses on the migrant women’s portraits that emerge in the Italian press. This discursive arena is dealt with by paying attention to what is taken for granted in the discourses about migrant women and their reproductive rights and behaviours. The analysis is based on a dataset of 634 newspapers articles, published between June 20...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between religious and political involvement in members of Catholic associations today in the northern Italian Region of Lombardy, which in last decades appeared to anticipate Italian political changes. Right through history religion has been intensely politicized in Italy, with religious associat...

On 1st March 2010 a “Migrants’ Strike” took place in Italy as well as in other European countries. In Italy, its organisation relied on a wide network of migrants’ associations. Based on press analysis, participant observations and interviews, this paper focuses on the case study of the Italian Migrants’ Strike, aiming at exploring the political si...

This paper presents a case study of conflicts among politicians, local residents and civil society organisations about the future of a green open space in the City of Milan (Italy). The city purported to be an exemplar of New Public Administration—the incorporation of commercial business methods and efficiency into the public services, hallmarked b...