Quaderni di Teoria Sociale

Artificial Intelligence Inherits a Past. A Conversation with Gabriele Balbi

2026-06-26T14:18:56+02:00

In this interview, Prof. Gabriele Balbi reflects on the historical and material conditions of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI). Drawing on his work as a media historian, the conversation resists the prevailing tendency to apprehend the present moment in AI as historically unprecedented and instead situates the current "summer" of generative AI within the longer trajectory of digitalization, the platform economy, and the cycles of hype through which "revolutionary" technologies have repeatedly been announced and absorbed. From this perspective, Balbi argues that generative AI is less a rupture than a continuation: heir to the financialization, extractivism, and ideological framings of earlier digital formations, it can know only what has already been written, even as it promises to author the future. The conversation considers the political economy of the major AI platforms, the materiality of computation, the geographies of innovation beyond the Sino-American duopoly, and the paradox of a technology that announces the future while reinstating the extractive logics of the nineteenth century.

Introduzione. La creatività come bene comune

2026-06-26T13:19:00+02:00

Studiare le giovani generazioni significa interrogare il presente. I giovani non rappresentano soltanto il futuro di una società ma ne sono il sismografo più sensibile, i primi a registrare le scosse del mutamento, a tradurre in linguaggi nuovi le tensioni che attraversano il corpo sociale. Questa convinzione – che attraversa più di vent’anni di indagini scientifiche dell’Osservatorio Giovani del Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali dell’Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II – è il punto di partenza del progetto di ricerca-azione GenerAzione CreAttiva. Partecipazione, creatività e innovazione, promosso dall’Osservatorio Giovani e finanziato dalla Regione Campania nell’ambito dell’Avviso pubblico “Misure per i Giovani – Interventi di ricerca-azione” (Delibera di Giunta Regionale n. 528/2022). Il presente numero monografico dei Quaderni di Teoria Sociale nasce da questo progetto, di cui costituisce la principale sede di disseminazione scientifica. I quattro saggi che lo compongono non si limitano a documentare attività e risultati ma si propongono come contributi teorici autonomi, capaci di interrogare in profondità i nessi tra creatività, partecipazione civica e innovazione sociale nel contesto delle giovani generazioni campane e, più in generale, nelle società contemporanee.

Creatività, innovazione sociale e partecipazione giovanile

2026-06-26T13:38:24+02:00

This article examines the relationship between creative practices, social innovation and civic participation in Campania, with particular reference to the young generations (18–35 years old). Drawing on theoretical frameworks developed in the sociology of culture, urban sociology and social innovation studies, the contribution argues that music, art, and widespread cultural production can function as devices of civic activation and contribute to redefining public space, especially in territories marked by strong social inequalities. The article engages with classical and contemporary sociological theories – from the Frankfurt School to the sociology of art worlds, from Bourdieu’s cultural field theory to recent approaches in social innovation and participatory urbanism – to offer an interpretive framework capable of accounting for the complex dynamics of youth cultural production and civic life in Southern Italy. The analysis is grounded in the research-action project “Generazione Creattiva. Participation, Creativity and Innovation” and in over twenty years of empirical research on youth cultures in Campania conducted by the Osservatorio Giovani of the University of Naples Federico II.

Regimi di visibilità e partecipazione politica giovanile. Per un’integrazione della teoria partecipativa nella prospettiva della cultura visuale

2026-06-26T13:42:47+02:00

Political sociology has traditionally classified participatory acts according to their intrinsic properties — subjective cost, institutional function, morphology — assuming organisational affiliation as the general condition of political efficacy. Building on the constructivist turn in democratic theory, this essay integrates the established taxonomies with a meta-categorical criterion derived from visual culture: configurative efficacy within the regime of visibility, understood as the capacity of a participatory act to alter the thresholds of intelligibility through which a political field recognises its relevant subjects. The criterion responds to a structural transformation of the representative field here termed dis-cursus honorum: in algorithmic ecologies, the construction of political careers detaches from the vertical progression of party militancy (cursus honorum) and unfolds in the horizontal network of public appearance, where the figurative dimension of representation (Darstellen) tends to precede and to enable representative delegation (Vertreten) — inverting on the field of democratic representation the sequence that Spivak's analysis had kept distinct on the discursive register. The conceptual framework draws on Mitchell's account of image agency, Mirzoeff's theory of visuality and counter-visuality, and Rancière's partage du sensible. The 2025 New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani is used to illustrate the analytical device. The proposed criterion offers interpretive purchase on the repertoire of visual and creative practices that taxonomies calibrated on organisational mediation tend to misread, and renders the generational configuration of the mobilised yet unaffiliated theoretically legible.

Privazione simbolica e devianza minorile. Per una teoria critica della criminalità giovanile a Napoli

2026-06-26T13:49:18+02:00

This paper advances a theory of juvenile deviance as the outcome of an alternative symbolic subjectivation process, drawing on the findings of the research project La devianza e la criminalità minorile nella Città Metropolitana di Napoli [Letizia 2025], conducted at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Naples Federico II in collaboration with the Osservatorio Giovani of the same Department and the Juvenile Justice Centre of Naples. Against readings of marginality as absence – of resources, opportunities, or culture – the paper argues that the symbolic space left vacant by legitimate cultural institutions does not remain inert, but is occupied by an endomimetic symbolic field endowed with its own internal coherence, its own logic of transmission and its own capacity to dispositionalize subjects who are culturally saturated with an order alternative to the institutionally legitimated one. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of reproduction, Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony and Foucault's theory of subjectivation, the paper elaborates the concept of incorporated symbolic deprivation and introduces the Autopoietic Metasystem of Deviance as an interpretive model, articulated around four matrices: family, neighbourhood, peer group and camorra. The paper concludes with a theoretical reflection on the conditions of a cultural and creative intervention conceived not as a tool of rehabilitation, but as a practice of counter-literacy capable of restoring the subject's capacity to desire what it has never been able to imagine wanting.

Divari di immaginazione. Digitale, creatività e giovani generazioni nell’era dell’intelligenza artificiale

2026-06-26T14:06:06+02:00

This article proposes a theoretical framework for interpreting the relationship between future imaginaries, digital practices, and conditions of participation among younger generations. Drawing on the sociology of time, sociotechnical imaginaries, and digital inequality studies, it argues that the capacity to imagine alternative futures is not a spontaneous individual disposition, but a socially and culturally situated competence, unequally distributed along structural lines. The digital environment – and artificial intelligence in particular – has become a key terrain on which this inequality is enacted: those with adequate cultural, symbolic, and formative resources can use digital tools for expression, meaning-making, and civic engagement, while those without them are subjected to imaginaries built elsewhere. The article examines this dynamic across three interconnected dimensions: the sociology of future-oriented anticipation and Futures Literacy as a learnable capacity; sociotechnical imaginaries and the contested symbolic field of artificial intelligence; and digital competences as a structural condition of access to collective imaginaries, reframing the digital divide as a divide of imagination. The concluding paragraphs examine the relationship between youth creativity and generative artificial intelligence, showing how the symbolic asymmetries that run through cultural production are redefined – without dissolving – within the algorithmic environment. They also interrogate the role of educational institutions as spaces in which young people’s capacity to imagine, create, and act can be either cultivated or further compressed.

Lo Stato e il suo pensiero. L’approccio teorico di Sayad attraverso e oltre la migrazione

2026-06-26T14:09:46+02:00

This article examines Abdelmalek Sayad’s theoretical and epistemological contributions to the sociological debate, highlighting how his work transcends the study of migratory mobility to illuminate the functioning of the State and its mechanisms of domination. Sayad conceptualizes migration as a total social fact and critiques conventional approaches that reduce migration to labour mobility or isolated social problems. These readings of migration reveal a partial and simplified view of the phenomenon, shaped by the needs of the receiving society. Starting from this contradiction, the Algerian author highlights how everyday discourses about migration mask ethnocentric intentions and reproduce asymmetries rooted in global hierarchies and colonial legacies. Within this framework, Sayad develops a profound analysis of the State and its sociogenesis. The State, through the incorporation of its thought into social agents, naturalises the distinction between nationals and non-nationals on which its very existence is founded, constructing boundaries that are simultaneously symbolic and material. Sayad shows how migration is a privileged lens for revealing the assumptions on which the contemporary political community embodied by the State rests and offers fruitful and still unexplored avenues of research. Building on Sayad’s legacy, the contributions in this and in the next issue of Quaderni di Teoria Sociale extend his insights to historical colonialism, legal theory, and the management of urban space, showing how migration reveals the State’s power asymmetries, social hierarchies, and the persistent production of internal strangers.

Abdelmalek Sayad interprete di Hans Kelsen: elementi per una teoria critica del diritto delle persone straniere

2026-06-26T14:13:18+02:00

This article undertakes an in-depth analysis of a surprising and largely overlooked intellectual gesture: the tribute paid by the sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad to the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen in one of his final essays on the “double penalty” (double peine) affecting immigrants. In praising Kelsen for having rebelled against the “State thought” (pensée d’État), Sayad suggests an unexpected theoretical convergence between the two, whose backgrounds and disciplinary trajectories could not appear more disparate. This article argues that the profound value of this convergence lies in its contribution to the foundations of a Critical Immigration Legal Theory. To develop this thesis, the essay proceeds as follows. First, it juxtaposes the biographical and intellectual profiles of Kelsen and Sayad to illuminate the stakes of their unlikely alliance. Second, it reconstructs the essential elements of Sayad’s critique of “State thought,” drawing also on his intellectual relationship with Pierre Bourdieu. Third, it clarifies the specific critical instance Sayad identified in Kelsen’s epistemological framework—namely, his pure theory of law—as an instrument for liberating legal science from the categories imposed by the State. Fourth, it demonstrates a substantive convergence between Sayad’s sociological critique and Kelsen’s philosophical dismantling of the traditional doctrinal triad of “people,” “territory,” and “sovereignty” within the theory of the Nation-state. Finally, it underscores the strategic importance of a Critical Immigration Legal Theory, one capable of synthesizing Kelsen’s normative rigor with Sayad’s ethnographic analyses of legal practices and discourses. In an era where state violence and the violence of borders proclaim their victory, calling peace a pile of corpses and rubble, this project is more urgent than ever.

Sayad in Nuova Spagna e il pensiero di Stato: migrazioni, immaginario coloniale e costruzione nazionale fra teoria e storia

2026-06-26T14:15:56+02:00

This article examines the formation of the “state thought” in early modern New Spain through a critical engagement with key concepts developed by the sociologist of migrations Abdelmalek Sayad, particularly the border between national and non-national and the colonial imaginary. In dialogue with decolonial approaches to the historical continuity of colonial forms of power, the article mobilises Sayad’s categories as analytical tools for historical enquiry, in order to illuminate how processes of classification, exclusion, and political subordination were embedded in the very construction of colonial order and its later national rearticulations. Focusing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain as an early case of settler colonialism, the article reconstructs the production of Indigenous peoples as subjects simultaneously represented as vulnerable and dangerous. This double representation emerges across missionary discourse, administrative practices, and creole intellectual production, including the works of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, understood here as exemplary of a broader creole project of historical appropriation and national construction. The celebration of precolonial Indigenous antiquity is shown to coexist with the delegitimation of coeval Indigenous populations, portrayed as politically incapable and dependent. From this perspective, the article suggests a structural continuity between the colonial production of Indigenous populations as internal outsiders and the modern construction of migrants as non-national subjects within contemporary state orders, highlighting the persistence of the colonial imaginary well beyond the formal end of colonial rule.

Recensioni

2026-06-26T14:22:35+02:00

Dario Basile

Sebastiano Benasso, Luca Benvenga, Trap! Suoni, segni e soggettività nella scena italiana, Anzio-Lavinio (RM), Novalogos, 2024, pp. 266.

Elisa Costantino

Nicoletta Sciarrino, Costruendo disabilità. Corpi non conformi, infanzie e società in contesti tanzaniani, Roma, Aracne, 2024, pp. 308.

Michele Garau

Lelio De Michelis, Tecno-archìa, o la Nave di folli. La banalità digitale del male, Bologna, DeriveApprodi, 2025, pp. 294.

Chiara Paglialonga

Enrico Valtellina (a cura di), Teorie critiche della disabilità. Uno sguardo politico sulle non conformità fisiche, relazionali, sensoriali, cognitive, Mimesis, Milano, 2024, pp. 224.