Sonia Brondi

Italian parliamentary debates on energy sustainability: How argumentative 'short-circuits' affect public engagement.

Public engagement is considered a crucial process in the transition towards sustainable energy systems. However, less space has been devoted to understand how policy makers and stakeholders view citizens and their relationship with energy issues. Nonetheless, together with technological advancements, policies and political debates on energy affect public engagement as well as individual practices. This article aims at tackling this issue by exploring how policy makers and stakeholders have socially constructed sustainable energy in Italian parliamentary debates and consultations during recent years (2009–2012). Results show that societal discourses on sustainable energy are oriented in a manner that precludes public engagement. The political debate is characterised by argumentative ‘short-circuits’ that constrain individual and community actions to the acceptance or the refusal of top-down decisions and that leave little room for community empowerment and bottom-up innovation.

Environmental Consciousness and Sustainable Energy Policies: Italian Parliamentary Debates in the Years 2009–2012

ABSTRACT This contribution examines levels and components of consciousness (knowledge, experiences, awareness, concerns, values) invoked by decision makers and key informants in their speeches on energy sustainability at the Italian parliament in the years 2009–2012. A socioconstructivist approach, indeed, suggests that meaning-making and negotiation processes involved in the creation of laws affect the cultural shift required for successful energy transitions. Discussions among decision makers (n = 90) and consultation with key informants (n = 93) were submitted to content analysis. Results show that levels of consciousness are low, and their increase is due to external events, but they rapidly return to the baseline when the events in question leave the agenda. Cognitive components largely prevail over affects and values. Concerns are associated with all the energy sources. The observed unbalance among the components of consciousness, although being a pragmatic rhetorical choice, opens several questions about the Italian approach to energy sustainability.

Photovoice as a visual-verbal strategy for studying contents and processes of social representations: a participatory project on sustainable energy

ABSTRACT Photovoice is a participatory action-research strategy that has been mainly adopted to give voice to “unheard” groups. In this article, we adapted this strategy in a study on the social representations (SRs) of sustainable energy shared by young citizens (ages 11–12) in Narni, Italy, a small urban center with a history intertwined with sustainable energy issues. In particular, the study suggests that photovoice could be useful to jointly examine verbal and visual components of social representations and to highlight communicative formats that contribute to shape SRs. Images of sustainable energy produced by participants show technocentric and ecocentric contents, confirming previous studies conducted with adults. Anthropocentric components also emerge, potentially identifying a challenging figurative nucleus. Photo-elicitation and small-group discussions show a twofold communicative activity: reification formats and homogamic communication are used to reaffirm shared representations, and the consensualization format is used when potentially disruptive elements for the community are at stake. Overall, results show the potentialities of photovoice experience for SR research and suggest that photovoice could actually benefit from further in-depth analyses of images and of communication within groups. Implications of the results for civic engagement are discussed.

Flooded by a wall of water: parent–child reminiscing about local environment and unwanted changes

ABSTRACT This article examines the long-lasting effects of an unwanted place change (i.e., the construction of a dam) on the social representations (SRs) of places and of place-community relationship. The study integrates an SRs approach, generative semiotics, and methods borrowed from research on the social making of autobiographical memory. The aim is to explore whether and how intergenerational family narratives contribute to the transmission of SRs. Parent-child pairs were asked to share episodes linked to the dam. Video-recordings were submitted to thematic content analysis and semiotic analysis. Results show that parents and children associate the dam with a radical transformation: it acts as a performer of separation between the community and its territory. The analysis of interactions gives further insights into the how family and community memories are connected. This first attempt confirms the potentialities of the integrated approach to understanding the processes of intergenerational transmission of social representations, and paves the way to further refinements.

Shaken and stirred: Social representations, social media, and community empowerment in emergency contexts

Abstract In this paper we examine the use of Twitter and Facebook in two dramatic earthquakes that hit Italy: L’Aquila (in 2009) and Emilia (in 2012). Indeed, disasters disrupt everyday life and engage people in meaning-making processes aimed at recovering meaning and control of their world. In these cases, we argue that the use of social media may contribute to social representations processes and functions: cognitive coping, social sharing of emotions, preserving self-efficacy, boosting identity, and community empowerment. Different methods were adopted to examine the use of social media in the immediate aftermath, a few days after, and in the medium-long term. Differences between the events, combined with the differences between Twitter and Facebook, entailed a multiplicity of uses. Nevertheless, the analyses point to the same conclusions: by fostering new forms of communication and encounters, social media played an increasingly important role during and after the earthquakes. First, they were used for providing information and material coping, then they favored the social sharing of emotions and joint remembering, and finally they contributed to claiming voice and control. Results thus suggest that the use of social media favored different representational functions, which progressively contributed to community empowerment.