AbstractThis chapter addresses the discursive practices, media-related and not, adopted by the Italian Stop 5G RKC to produce, stabilise and transform its shared (refused) knowledge. Adopting an ecological approach, this inquiry has its main focus on the digital sphere as a transmedia circulation environment in which a range of discourses and narratives can coexist and interact in multiple ways, sometimes colliding and competing, sometimes adapting to each other, sometimes merging in new ways. In particular, it shows how, during the pandemic crisis, the Stop 5G RKC transformed its discursive practices (and, consequently, its shared knowledge) from a ‘scientific patchwork’ storytelling approach—based on a rigid definition of borders and selection of scientific sources—to a ‘syncretic patchwork’ storytelling approach—based on combining diverse and sometimes conflicting discursive sources (e.g. scientific knowledge, folklore, new age spirituality and conspiracy theories). This perspective allows to highlight the close relationship between the RKCs’ discursive practices, their forms of organisation and the shared (refused) knowledge they produce and reproduce.

AbstractThis chapter describes the research context and justification for the book. It discusses the relevance of contemporary practices contesting scientific knowledge, with a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic. It introduces the theoretical and methodological background adopted to understand how and under which conditions groups of people assign credibility and trust to knowledge claims located outside the established boundaries of science. In doing so, the chapter proposes an integrated perspective by intersecting the Social Worlds Framework with the major analytical standpoints developed by Actor-Network Theory in the field of science and technology studies. It then describes the content of the various chapters of the book and concludes with their relevance to understanding the ways individuals or groups of people question the legitimacy of science’s claim to define what nature and society are and how societies should be governed.

Drawing on a 12-month virtual ethnography on the main online spaces of three refused knowledge communities (RKCs) in Italy, this study aims at contributing to the debate on emerging forms of science-related populism from a two-fold perspective. First, we identify and describe the main features and the role played by an understudied figure who we label the 'catalyst of dissent' - a public influencer who does not belong to the scientific community and contributes to the spread of science-related populist narratives within a grassroots ecosystem of resistance to institutional science. Second, our research highlights how RKCs - communities proposing visions of science and medicine denied acceptance or even consideration by institutional science - can appropriate some key resources produced by the catalysts. The analysis focuses on the interplay between the catalysts and three main RKCs during the pandemic crisis in Italy: The No-5G, the Free-Vax, and the 5 Biological Laws communities.

It is well known that throughout his long and brilliant career Trevor Pinch was a leading scholar in at least three research fields. In the sociology of scientific knowledge he was one of the most influential contributors, both alone and in collaboration with his mentor Harry Collins (see in particular Collins and Pinch, 1982; and Pinch 1985, 1986). He co-founded and developed the sociology of technology and the field of science and technology studies for which, in 2018, he was awarded the prestigious John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). Later in his career, he was a core player in the field of sound studies (see for example Pinch and Bijsterveld (eds), 2003, 2004, 2012), to which he was led by his work on the Moog synthesizer (Pinch and Trocco, 2002) and his passionate love for music. However, the work of Trevor Pinch, and in particular the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach that he developed with Wiebe Bijker (Pinch and Bijker, 1984), has also been influential for many other neighbouring research fields to which he contributed only indirectly or episodically. This is the case for organisational studies, for example, or for studies of innovation. It is also the case for media studies. In what follows, as a media scholar, I represent the intellectual debt of my field to the work of Trevor Pinch. To do so, I will first clarify the role played by SCOT in the disciplinary tradition of media studies, in particular in the 1990s and at the beginning of the new century. I will then move my focus to lesser-known works by Trevor Pinch on mediated communication, which he sporadically addressed as part of his broader research interests (related, for example, to the practice of selling). My attempt will be to retrace the tenets of Pinch’s own take on media as they emerge both from these too rare interventions and from the methodological reflection he has dedicated to the topic. In my final remarks, I will draw on the two preceding sections to highlight some other possible points of crosspollination between the current field of media studies and Trevor Pinch’s work, that remain to be explored in depth.

This crossing boundaries section addresses the substantial aspects at stake in reshaping the nexus between science, politics and society triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this regard, three main dimensions are explored: first, the emerging forms of science-related populism and how political narratives challenge and dispute prevailing scientific knowledge; second, the platformization of science communication and the active role of users and communities in consuming and spreading online misinformation; third, the role of lay expertise in contesting the epistemic authority of science during the health emergency. The authors explore the related topics by mobilizing different theoretical frameworks from STS studies, media studies and legal science, also moving from empirical to theoretical level in order to challenge the "surface" of a multilayered phenomenon.

This book is the first in-depth investigation of the Goth subculture in Italy, focusing in particular on the city of Milan. This volume proposes an innovative approach to the study of spectacular subcultures which counters the most common accounts of the spectacular subcultures of the 80s.

This chapter describes how the music club enactment of dark took shape alongside the activist one retracing the history of Milanese alternative music clubs, and in particular of the Hysterika disco, the main dark club in Milan in the 1980s. The specificities of the disco club enactment are addressed and compared to those of the activist enactment: these differences do not relate only to the stance towards political activism, which music club darks dismissed in favour of an identity politics that had to be expressed through a shocking style flaunted in urban public places. It related also to patterns of socialisation, relationship with public space, style and finally criteria of subcultural authentication. In this enactment, in fact, subcultural capital was gained showing high competences in the subcultural canon, regarding both cultural consumption (music, but also literature, theatre, cinema and the arts) and style, and subcultural identities were validated showing a coherence in style throughout all the situations of subculturalists’ daily lives. The two enactments had also their own sub-scene, even if these sub-scenes overlapped, allowing the circulation of members. The chapter ends with the closure of Hysterika in 1991, sketching the main lines of transformation of the enactment in the following decade.

The chapter discusses the concept of subcultural canon, adopted—and adapted—from the field of fun studies to account for the consistent distinctiveness of the subculture. The subcultural canon is described as the result of steadily ongoing practices of assemblage and negotiation between members of the subculture, and as open and flexible, with some subcultural resources being canonised or de-canonised during the 1980s. These practices had their own logic (like internal validation, when a canonised cultural resource, like a band quoted another artist, book or movie) and their own mediators, like DJs, fanzine or music shops. Three different kinds of cultural resources are addressed in depth: music; literature, cinema and the arts; style. Regarding music, two different conceptualisations of the canon, both present in the interviews, are jointly addressed: a retrospective, closed and stabilised view of the canon and an in-the-making, open and processual view of the canon (or rather, of the process of canonisation) as perceived at the time. The controversial status of the neofolk sub-canon is also discussed for its political implications, in particular within the music club enactment. Regarding literature, cinema and the arts, the chapter in-depth explores the logics of internal validation for the assemblage of the trans-medial subcultural canon. Finally, style is interrogated from the standpoint of the different attitudes of the dark enactments towards commercialisation, and in its relationship with gender identity.

This chapter describes the years of ‘riflusso’ (‘the ebb’) in the city of Milan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, under the social, cultural and political points of view: the years when the movements of the 1970s came to an end and a general withdraw in the private sphere started. Two complementary tendencies could be observed in Milan: the ongoing harsh repression of the political movements by the state connected to their terrorist drift and the attempt, during the 1980s, to normalise any form of counterculture in the city; the rise of a new culture of hedonism, praising consumerism and inviting to individualist pleasure to be experienced as consumption. Giving voice to the interviewees, the chapter also depicts how subculturalists perceived these two complementary tendencies, and how they framed their experience of subcultural belonging as a way to resist the ongoing tendencies, and to oppose mainstream culture.

In the conclusions, we resume the main theoretical and empirical findings of the previous chapters. Under a theoretical point of view, we discuss how our practice-centred approach, based on the concepts of social practices, canon and enactment, can help accounting for the consistent distinctiveness of a subculture and, at the same time, for its plural structures of meanings, avoiding the pitfalls of ‘substantive thinking’. We then point out how a practice-based approach could be also applied to the study of post-subcultures, helping to circumvent the present frontal contraposition (and the stalemate) between subculturalist and post-subculturalist approaches. Under an empirical point of view, we summarise how the three enactments of Milanese dark in the 1980s differed in key aspects such as attitude toward political engagement, practices of socialisation, style and dressing practices, sub-scenes, criteria for the validation of subcultural identities and for gaining subcultural capital, relationship with the public space. At the end of the conclusion, we leave word to our interviewees, who comment the relevance of the experience of subcultural belonging for subsequent processes of identity construction, and ultimately for their own lives.

The chapter presents the loner enactment of dark, which was typical of, but not restricted to, the suburbia and the small towns neighbouring the city of Milan. Differently from the other enactments, in this loner one the experience of subcultural belonging was lived aloneness, or in small isolated groups often composed by members with different subcultural affiliations. The enactment, which could represent either a temporary phase in a subcultural career or a permanently embraced way to live the subculture, is discussed in depth through a comparison with Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber’s “bedroom cultures”. With bedroom cultures, in fact, this enactment had several points of contact—the fetishisation of cultural consumption, in particular—but also important differences, since it equally involved members of both genders, and assigned a capital relevance to visibility in the public space. In what can be regarded as a sort of virtual scene, a key relevance was also assigned to mediated forms of communication, like epistolary exchanges, and producing and reading fanzines. Given their relevance, the chapter ends accounting for the main fanzines produced in the Milanese goth scene, and in particular for Amen, the first and most influential Italian darkzine during the 1980s.

This Special Section argues for a wider recognition of urban media studies-an emerging and vibrant scholarly space for research that permeates the borders of both media/communication studies and urban studies. Our main motivation and aim is to shed light on the mutually constitutive entanglement of media, in all their multiplicity, and urban phenomena. Before introducing the articles gathered for this Special Section to exemplify this intersectional approach, this introductory article first lays out some of the key elements that help define, though do not exhaust, the field of urban media studies. Moreover, we identify some important developments in both media studies and urban studies that have paved the way to the endeavor, such as non-media-centric approaches to media and relational/processual takes on urban space. We bring together some familiar and emerging models in the formation of urban media studies, even if we envisage this emerging scholarly space as open to further refinements, additions, and modulations, as necessitated by individual research interests and contexts.

This Special Section argues for a wider recognition of urban media studies—an emerging and vibrant scholarly space for research that permeates the borders of both media/ communication studies and urban studies. Our main motivation and aim is to shed light on the mutually constitutive entanglement of media, in all their multiplicity, and urban phenomena. Before introducing the articles gathered for this Special Section to exemplify this intersectional approach, this introductory article first lays out some of the key elements that help define, though do not exhaust, the field of urban media studies. Moreover, we identify some important developments in both media studies and urban studies that have paved the way to the endeavor, such as non-media-centric approaches to media and relational/processual takes on urban space. We bring together some familiar and emerging models in the formation of urban media studies, even if we envisage this emerging scholarly space as open to further refinements, additions, and modulations, as necessitated by individual research interests and contexts.

In this interview, Simone Tosoni and Seija Ridell discuss with Will Straw, professor of urban media studies at McGill University, Canada, his views of this subject area. Professorships that would explicitly focus on the intersection of media studies and urban studies are rare internationally, Straw's position being one of them. The interview sheds light on how urban media studies came about and were institutionalized at McGill University, how Straw practices urban media studies in his own teaching, and how he sees the future of this "interdiscipline." The second part of the interview addresses two of Straw's main research topics and their relation to urban media studies: his studies on scenes and the night. Will Straw is James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in '50s America (Andrew Roth Gallery, 2006) and coeditor of several volumes including Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (with Alexandra Boutros), Formes Urbaines (with Anouk Belanger and Annie Gerin), and The Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema (with Janine Marchessault). He has published widely on popular culture of all kinds and is the author of more than 150 articles on music, cinema, and urban culture.