Who we are

The Research Group SLANG – Slanting Gaze on Social Control, Labour, Racism and Migrations aims to develop a direct connection between scientific production and the public sphere in order to promote within the public debate useful knowledge. This includes skills for past a present comprehension, for social transformation analysis and for a critical analysis of future possible implications.

Recognizing the plurality of theoretical perspectives and research methods complementarity, the Research Group aims to integrate the punctual analysis of social facts with social processes reconstruction with a necessarily diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective. Particular attention is given to social transformation dynamics and to their possible evolutions.

SLANG aims to interact with a wider audience than that of academic and expert community. We consider the University as the privileged contest where it is possible to learn, elaborate, highlight and transmit social science methods and contents helpful to describe, to interpret and orient social transformation. Our particular concern is devoted to the promotion and orientation of the public debate on relevant issues concerning social control, labour processes, racialization and migrations such as: the increasing social inequalities, gender and class relations, transformations of labour, old and new racisms, the forms of violence and their legitimations, deviances and urban conflicts.

Our goals

The research group aims to promote forms of collaboration and reciprocal influence among different topics of sociology and other knowledge outlets wishing to share the same understanding of the public role of science and academia such as institutions at the service of the community. Our aim is to contrast excessive specialization of sciences, in the belief that sciences’ task is to analyze and interpret processes that constantly intersect and go beyond the content of the different disciplines. With this purpose, the research group develops and supports interdisciplinary methods and theories, which are the result of empirical and theoretical research animated by the collaboration and comparison between different disciplinary scientific fields and between neighboring disciplines.

The activity of the group will qualify as empirical social research, theory-driven, open to discussion at national and international level.

SLANG undertakes to link different forms of social sciences critical theory: perspectives that are investigating both how social actors often unconsciously reproduce multiple systems of domination and the study of bottom-up conflictual experiences of ordinary people, with their social suffering and emancipatory practices that bring into question the established order of things, opening it up to new possibilities.

Furthermore, aware of the renewed interest in social practices (the so-called practice turn in the social sciences), to the spatial dimension of social life (spatial turn), to the multi-sensory nature of human communication (sensorial turn), SLANG experiments on the ground multiple visual methods of social research.

Another important topic of this research group is to develop the study of the different forms of work in contemporary times in a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Our research focuses on gradations of freedom of wage and non-wage labour maintaining a non-Eurocentric perspective, aiming to overcome the methodological nationalism. The study of the organization of production and working conditions in the various branches of the economy is intertwined with the attention to the different forms of conflict and mobilization fielded by workers. Finally, special attention is devoted to the relationship between labour and migration, which is one of the central features of the current global employment systems.

Our research

The research group promotes a reassessment of the dimension of teaching and dissemination as priority vehicles for the transmission of knowledge and sociological methods of analysis and research outside the academy.

The research group considers the centrality of a direct connection between production and development of scientific knowledge and believes that the transfer of research results outside the academic world should be a priority in planning scientific activities.

Students are the first addressees and first carriers for the transmission of the results of studies and research conducted by academics: in addition to providing the theoretical and methodological essential tools for sociology in the basic courses, the research group intends to promote educational activities linking closely the theoretical aspects with the field research in which his members are involved.

The group intends to devote the same attention to outreaching activities outside the university. Therefore making itself available to promote directly through its components, information, awareness and analysis paths on topical issues on which it leads research programs. It is aimed to open spaces of discussion with external stakeholders, such as institutions, political and trade union representatives, groups, social movements and associations, at a local, national and global level.

Our collaborations

We worked together for doing research, publishing and teaching.

For instance, Annalisa Frisina, Devi Sacchetto and Alessio Surian cooperated within the research group InteRGRace (see our Symposia: 2014 On the Historical, Social and Cultural Constructions of the Body; 2016, On Visuality and AntiRacism). Moreover, Francesca Vianello and Devi Sacchetto worked together within the Project “The work of prisoners” (Padua University, 2013) and for the Symposia “Prison and Labour” (15/12/2014) and “Globalization and crisis. Labour, migrations, value” (4-5/2/16, organized by Sandro Chignola, Devi Sacchetto and Francesca Alice Vianello). We cooperated for two cycles of international seminars: on “Total institutions between right and violence” (2016, organized by Francesca Vianello and Adriano Zamperini); and on “Decolonizing Social Sciences” (December 2016-March 2017, organized by Francesca Vianello, Annalisa Frisina and Devi Sacchetto).