John Cabot University ScholarShip

Recent Submissions

  • Publication
    β€˜Selfies’ Under Quarantine: Exploring Networked Emotions in the Time of β€˜Social Distancing.’
    (2021) Della Ratta, Donatella
    This essay focuses on auto-ethnography and auto-fiction as USEFUL tools to reflect on the ways in which networked identities are reshaped and reconfigured within the context of a global pandemic where social relationships, family life, work routines, and learning processes are increasingly migrating to the online domain. The piece builds upon the experience of an undergraduate class who collectively contributed to the blog series β€˜Selfies Under Quarantine’ during the first severe lockdown in March 2020. It discusses the question of methods and suggests looking at the β€˜draft’ as both an aesthetics and an ethics to navigate the current context of crisis.
  • Publication
    Peirce and Cybernetics: Retroduction, Error and Auto-poiesis in Future Thinking
    (2018) Antomarini, Brunella
    The aim of this paper is to connect Peirce’s logic of abduction to the cybernetics of living systems. Living beings cannot be understood through a causalistic epistemology, as they behave according to the effects and not according to the causes. Cybernetics has analyzed the way in which non-trivial machines (that is, machines being able to reproduce themselves by correcting themselves) move through retroaction, or feedback loop: at each step the system (effector) corrects the previous step depending on how far the previous step goes with respect to a possible equilibrium. The dynamics implies a possible inhibition of excessive energy followed by a possible enhancement of insufficient energy. Each of these conditions are errors that automatically correct themselves reaching a temporary state of homeostasis. Self-correction means that they must add to the output a β€œcreative” additional impulse, that is unique and unpredictable (or a new algorithm). The logic that is capable to make sense of this dynamics is Peirce’s abduction, also called retroduction, in that the inferential act retroacts on an incomprehensible fact, an epistemological β€œerror”, by inventing its cause. Thinking and the auto-poiesis of living systems proceed on the same path, replacing occasional strategies to atemporal universal causes. Abduction is the evidence that it is possible to reach a condition of β€œknowledge” without resorting to causality. The possibility that the β€œlaws of nature”, (science itself), may proceed in this way concludes the essay, by adding physicist Lee Smolin’s notion of the β€œprinciple of precedence”, as inspired by Peirce’s idea of the evolution of the laws of nature and their temporal, that is, contingent, character.
  • Publication
    The French Revolution and the Craft of the Liminal Void: From the Sanctity of Power to the Political Power of the Limitless Sacred
    (2018) Roman, Camil
    This paper argues for a political anthropological approach to the study of the French revolution. Looking at the revolution as a moment of liminality, it substantiates two interconnected points. The first is that a proper understanding of the revolutionary dynamic and its lasting effects have to engage closely with the transformation of the sacred and its relation to the existential void. Situated in post-Durkheimian sociology and post-Kantian philosophy, this argument advocates the methodological normalization of metaphysics, drawing attention to the fact that faith belongs to the symbolic, existential and representational realities of any political order, and hence also of its underlying knowledge systems. The second point argues that through the sacrifice of Louis XVI, the French revolution consecrated the ritual and existential sacrifice of the Christian Father. This historical experience is conceptualized as the people’s third body, and the new configuration of the sacred to which it gives birth is interpreted in terms of the liminal void. In this way, the French revolution is shown to constitute the transition from a political order of embodiment – participation in the divine, symbolized by the sacred royal body to a political order of bodies; participation in the liminal void, symbolized by the sacred empty place of the power of the modern democratic imagination.
  • Publication
    Social Entrepreneurship Policy: Evidences from the Italian Reform
    (2019) Carnini Pulino, Silvia; Maiolini, Riccardo; Venturi, Paolo
    Social entrepreneurship (third sector) is an increasingly important global economic phenomenon that is squarely under the academic lens. Social entrepreneurship represents an interesting opportunity for policy makers to explore new frontiers of economic growth and implement innovation in a potentially growing services sector with possible job opportunities coming from new job creation in the upcoming decades. Based on evidence from Italy, this paper considers the broader picture of this phenomenon. Addressing the need to better understand the drivers of social entrepreneurship policy, we propose a model for interpreting the impact of the recent Italian reform of the third sector at various levels of the ecosystem, which favors innovation, technology adaptation, and greater employability. The presented results contribute to laying the foundation for the further development of a theory of entrepreneurship policy.
  • Publication
    On Upward-Planar L-Drawings of Graphs
    (2024) Angelini, Patrizio; Chaplick, Steven; Cornelsen, Sabine; Da Lozzo, Giordano
    In anupward-planar L-drawingof a directed acyclic graph (DAG)each edgee= (v,w) is represented as a polyline composed of a vertical segment with itslowest endpoint at thetailvofeand of a horizontal segment ending at theheadwofe.Distinct edges may overlap, but must not cross. Recently, upward-planar L-drawingshave been studied forst-graphs, i.e., planar DAGs with a single sourcesand a singlesinktcontaining an edge directed fromstot. It is known that aplanest-graph, i.e.,an embeddedst-graph in which the edge (s,t) is incident to the outer face, admits anupward-planar L-drawing if and only if it admits a bitonicst-ordering, which can betested in linear time.We study upward-planar L-drawings of DAGs that are not necessarilyst-graphs. Asa combinatorial result, we show that a plane DAG admits an upward-planar L-drawingif and only if it is a subgraph of a planest-graph admitting a bitonicst-ordering.This allows us to show that not every tree with a fixed bimodal embedding admits anupward-planar L-drawing. Moreover, we prove that any directed acyclic cactus witha single source (or a single sink) admits an upward-planar L-drawing, which respectsa given outerplanar embedding if there are no transitive edges. On the algorithmicside, we consider DAGs with a single source (or a single sink). We give linear-timetesting algorithms for these DAGs in two cases: (a) when the drawing must respect aprescribed embedding and (b) when no restriction is given on the embedding, but theunderlying undirected graph is series-parallel. For the single-sink case of (b) it evensuffices that each biconnected component is series-parallel.

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