Research Unit 4 - Inclusive, innovative and secure societies
Strategic research lines
1. Development, innovation and justice
Contact person: Benedetta Giovanola, benedetta.giovanola@unimc.it
This line of research has two main tracks:
- One track focuses on the relationship between development, social justice, and global justice. The aim is to foster new ideas, strategies, and governance structures, which can meet contemporary grand societal changes, and contribute to the promotion of an inclusive, smart, and sustainable development, which is at the core of Europe 2020 strategy. The following researches can be included in this track: researches on the relationship between economic growth, social cohesion, fairness, and policies; researches which deal with economic, social, and political inclusion, and analyse the inter-cultural dynamics in the EU; researches which focus on the relationship between Europe and international partners and analyse the role of Europe as a global actor, as far as it concerns its capability to strengthen its principles, foster global justice, fight poverty, and have an impact at the global political-institutional level.
- Another track analyses the relationship between development and social innovation, and focuses on the role of companies, as well as on the public-private relation in the creation of new forms of innovation that can play a strategic role in overcoming the crisis and fostering opportunities for growth. The following researches can be included in this track: researches on corporate social responsibility-CSR (including new “frontiers” of CSR, such as workplace challenges, demographic change and active ageing, employability); sustainability; innovation of business models and corporate strategy; new forms of social collaboration between different business sectors and stakeholders.
2. Social Inclusion
Contact person: Luigino Alici, luigi.alici@unimc.it
In contemporary societies the perception of risk and the call for protection are increasing. Assuming Horizon 2020 as its frame, the project elaborates an inclusive and articulated viewpoint over the differences, that allows to transform them into spaces and times of sharing and good reciprocity, following an alternative paradigm to the dominant cultural stereotype. An innovative rethinking of reciprocity legitimates reassuring forms of inclusion and inclusive forms of secureness, beyond the limits of the traditional area of expertise of law and order or legality.
An inquiry on relational goods calls into question the grounds of societies, the conditions of a plural sociality, that should be able to combine an open ideal of relationality with an established and hospitable experience of bonds, that leave a sediment of shared memory, preserving potentialities of identitary activation. In this framework the spatial dimension (with regard to self-constitution and social configurations) becomes important, together with its connection wit the issues of living-together. Furthermore, bringing the concept of sharing from spatiality to temporality level values the narrative fabric as condition and symbol of social bonds, necessary to activate dynamics of shared recognition, for a reconciliation of the injuries historically generated by a tragic refusal of the shared memory, for a rethinking of the idea of social responsibility and an activation of new virtuous ways of valuing the cultural-environmental endowment.
The philosophical reconstruction allows a critical inquiry about the conditions of possibility of such goods, and the outline of normative horizons to which coherent practices at institutional, cultural, social and educative levels correspond. Starting from such theoretical kernel, interdisciplinary studies are scheduled.
3. Gender studies, immigration, and citizenship
Contact person: Natascia Mattucci, natascia.mattucci@unimc.it
This line of research aims at developing an analysis of the function that gender and immigration studies could have in the promotion of an equal and active social inclusion, which is crucial in the perspective of a European citizenship. The promotion of factors of social inclusion requires the study of the multiple causes leading to the exclusion of individuals or groups that often gets stronger with the next generations. Nationality and gender have always worked as filters in the definition of the conditions of individuals and of their enjoyment of rights within a political space. In harmony with what stated by the Horizon 2020 program about the role that humanistic research could have in the construction of societies that are more and more inclusive and safe from a political, economic and social point of view, activating positive intercultural dynamics in Europe, we need to analyse the changes in the inclusion-exclusion criteria in the contemporary social-political and legal sphere. The analysis of the changes occurring in these criteria through the instruments provided by gender and immigration studies involves the focusing of complex dynamics, such as: threatened job security, social weakness, gender violence, racism, sexism and xenophobia, financial and gender inequality, equal opportunities, citizenship rights, immigration policies and immigrant integration policies, and so on. In addition, the promotion of social inclusion in the perspective of equality within difference and participation requires the diffusion of a shared memory and also a work on European history, as conditions for a fruitful process of construction of a grounded European citizenship.
4. Education in the knowledge society
Contact person: Pier Giuseppe Rossi, piergiuseppe.rossi@unimc.it
This line of research has two main tracks:
- One track is related to how education rethinks itself to meet the challenges that lie ahead. The following researches are included in this track: researches and projects related to didactic strategies, technologies for education, the role of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in teaching, the contribution of neurosciences (Neuro-pedagogy), professional didactics; the new profile of the professional teacher.
- Another track analyses possible interactions between the world of education and other sectors, in particular the world of business. Researches which support the following issues are included in this track
a. vocational guidance and needs analysis
b. clarification and mapping of competences to understand productive processes and available skills, to encourage vocational training and, ultimately, to facilitate business re-organisation and international competition
c. reorganization of knowledge and in productive structures of the first, second, and third sector
In this case, the pedagogical perspective becomes a moment of reflection on the processes of construction and organization of knowledge; therefore it needs to be seen in the interdisciplinary links with other sectors.
Coordinators of Research Unit and contact persons:
- Luigino Alici: luigi.alici@unimc.it
- Benedetta Giovanola: benedetta.giovanola@unimc.it
- Natascia Mattucci: natascia.mattucci@unimc.it
- Pier Giuseppe Rossi: piergiuseppe.rossi@unimc.it