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This article investigates the different types of emotions that result from participation in refugee solidarity activism, investigating how they change over time and to what extent they explain why individuals remain involved in action in spite of unfavorable circumstances. By bringing together scholarship on collective action with the literature on emotions, the article delves into the emotional response of sustained engagement in refugee solidarity activism. The study is based on the analysis of 40 in‐depth interviews with solidarity activists and volunteers involved in grassroots refugee solidarity initiatives along the Western Balkans route between 2015 and 2021, as well as on participant observation conducted between 2016 and 2021 in North Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The diachronic perspective presented in the article suggests that contrasting reactive emotions emerged during the initial stage of mobilization, while moral emotions were activated at a later stage. In the long run enduring affective bonds that had been formed with both solidarity peers and people on the move proved decisive for keeping individuals involved in action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, urban social movements that emerged in the Yugoslav successor states decided to form political platforms to enter the institutional arena, often after years of mobilisation for the right to the city. Their aim was to seize power at the local level, trying to provide an answer to the crisis of representative democracy and to oppose the process of centralisation of power. These platforms ran for elections in Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia), to reclaim local autonomy on societal, environmental, economic and political matters. Based on ethnographic work, document analysis and a series of in-depth interviews with activists, this article explores the trajectories of two platforms, 'Zagreb Is Ours' (Zagreb je naš) in Zagreb, Croatia, and 'We Won't Let Belgrade D(r)own' (Ne davimo Beograd) in Belgrade, Serbia. It analyses the factors accounting for the choice of urban activists to embrace new municipalist ideas as strategic ideological and political positioning of their electoral platforms, arguing that the reasons are twofold: the embeddedness into regional and transnational activist networks, which facilitated the process of diffusion of new municipalist ideas across Europe and locally, and the resonance of new municipalism with socialist Yugoslavia's decentralised system of self-management and direct democracy, an historical experience that the platforms' initiators partially reappraised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores collective identity frames and discursive strategies employed by social movement actors mobilizing in ethnically divided societies, a context where ethnicity constitutes the primary collective category of identification. By using Bosnia and Herzegovina as a case study, it analyzes movement framing in three waves of social protests that occurred in the country in the last decade. Specifically, it investigates the diverse ways in which movement leaders tackled ethnicity in their discourses. The article shows that movement leaders' narratives rested, respectively, on the primacy of human and citizenship rights, a common feeling of deprivation, and victimhood. Their approach toward ethnicity, however, differed in each wave. Ethnicity was openly rejected in 2013, avoided and not openly contested in 2014, and accepted and approached as an opportunity to bring further support to the movement in 2018. The article highlights that ethnicity can be tackled differently by social movement actors mobilizing on nonethnic grounds in divided societies, and that it might constitute a vantage point for social mobilization rather than a drawback, contributing to raising transversal solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divided societies by disclosing the distinctive features and mobilizing potential that the notion of urban commons retains in a war-torn society with a socialist legacy. Specifically, it investigates how urban space and urban commons are reclaimed in a post-conflict and post-socialist country such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. By using Sarajevo as a case study, the article explores several grassroots initiatives undertaken by local urban activists to reappropriate cultural buildings and public space in the city. The study discloses that in a post-conflict and post-socialist society urban commons can bear a unifying potential as acts of commoning favor trust reconstruction processes and strengthen community ties. While the erosion of social ties and the legacy of the war might not encourage mobilization for the commons, the reference to socialist-era practices and language can represent a vantage point to advocate in favor of collective governance. Throughout their actions, urban activists instrumentally referred to the historical experience of socialism to develop a discourse that resonates with the domestic cultural environment. The article points also to a generational difference amongst activists in their references to Yugoslav state socialism. While long-time activists strove to critically reappraise it, the younger ones born in the immediate post-war period appear to hold a more superficial and ambivalent historical knowledge of the socialist heritage, to which they had only partial access and no lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the political activism of youth of migrant descent mobilizing to achieve access to citizenship rights in Italy. Specifically, it focuses on the mobilizing practices and discursive strategies they employed throughout the 2017 campaign to reform the Italian citizenship law. By means of participant observation and in-depth interviews with representatives of the main groups involved in the campaign, the study shows that the so-called 'new Italians' claimed recognition and inclusion into the nation by relying on the idiom of legal rights and by using a language that rested upon the notion of deservingness and exceptionality. It also suggests that the youth constituted themselves as political actors by means of political engagement, as they performed acts of citizenship through which they enacted their right to that status even in absence of formal legal recognition. By putting studies on youth activism in conversation with critical citizenship literature, critical race theory and social movement scholarship, this study discloses how the 'new Italians' advocated for their rights, creating and appropriating their space within the discourse on nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores 'community gyms' as prefigurative counter spaces where sport is experienced as a political practice. Emerging in the framework of political squats in Italy and beyond, community gyms constitute an integral part of today's right to the city mobilization, with two unique contributions. Firstly, they reclaim the right to leisure space as a fundamental component of the struggle against gentrification. Secondly, they introduce to a critical approach to urban development also individuals who would otherwise not embrace anti-systemic politics. Specifically, the article analyses the spatial dimension of community gyms. It exposes how they constitute a bulwark against the commodification and gentrification of the urban habitat, recovering vacant or abandoned buildings to return them to the locals and embodying an alternative model of urban development centered on people rather than profit. The article also explores the gyms' relational dimension, showing how community gyms nurture novel relationships of care, in three ways: they include and give agency to marginalized subjects, they forge militants through sport practice, and seek to mitigate the socio-economic needs of their social surroundings. In so doing, the article shows that leisure, too, can create moments of disruption able to generate change, and that sport, when understood as a political act, can unsettle the capitalist logic of commodification of leisure. Inspired by a carnal sociology approach to social research, this article is based on original data gathered by means of in-depth interviewing, ethnographic observation and document analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hit by the economic and political crisis, young people in Italy face increased labor precarity and the disillusionment derived from the disappearance of the radical Left from the parliamentary arena. In the Italian context, economic hardship, the decrease of resources available for collective action, and the weakened mobilizing capacity that traditional mass organizations (such as trade unions and political parties) retained in the first decade of the 2000s brought about a general decline in intensity and visibility of street protests, leading to an apparent retreat of activism to the local level of action. Although the crisis had a negative impact on collective action, evidence reveals that more creative and less visible forms of societal and political commitment were adopted by young generations in these years. This article explores how the Italian youth in times of crisis engaged actively in alternative and unconventional forms of political commitment aimed at re-appropriating space, free time, and access to leisure, mainly by means of mutualistic practices. Based on data from qualitative semistructured interviews with key informants and activists, this article sheds light on recreational activism, adopted as a political practice by the Italian youth active in counter-cultural spaces, nowadays at the forefront of the struggle to oppose the commodification of free time and leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The countries of former Yugoslavia have a long history of dealing with refugees. However, what had been termed in the media and in public discourse as the '2015-2016 European migrant crisis' represented a phenomenon of unprecedented scale for the Western Balkan states. For the first time since the break-up of Yugoslavia, these countries found themselves handling a steep increase in arrivals of migrants who fled from the Middle East and Africa and crossed the Western Balkans migratory route in an attempt to reach Northern and Central Europe. To compensate for the lack of action on the part of their governments, from summer 2015 a number of individuals and domestic groups mobilized with the purpose of providing humanitarian assistance to migrants crossing their territory. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with key informants, this article explores the multiple solidarity initiatives organized at the local and transnational level along the Western Balkans route during the 2015-2016 migrant crisis, taking Serbia and Macedonia as case studies. Specifically, the study examines the extent to which emotional resources and discursive opportunities increased the prospects for altruistic mobilization in a context characterized by a low level of grassroots civic activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses the strategic practices adopted by social movement actors during the 2013 and 2014 mobilisations in Bosnia & Hercegovina. By bridging critical citizenship studies with literature on social movements, it classifies them as belonging to the realm of activist citizenship, but also as having a performative and prefigurative dimension. While the strategies adopted during the 2013 wave had a performative dimension, as they disrupted routines and created opportunities for social change, the 2014 practices are to be considered prefigurative, as they developed modes of interaction embodying a new model of citizenship at odds with the existing one based on the institutionalisation of ethno-national categories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Seven in silico models have been used to assess the prediction accuracy of chemical compound carcinogenicity. More than 1500 compounds with experimental values have been used to evaluate the models. Here we review the application of these models for toxicity prediction and their advantages and disadvantages, discussing the different approaches underlying the models and their main critical points. Some models have fewer false negatives while others are better at avoiding false positives. Since carcinogenicity is typically evaluated using a series of studies, identification of a strategy using one, or preferably a battery of in silico models, could reduce the number of animal studies needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We introduce a categorical closure operator in the category of topological abelian groups (and continuous homomorphisms) as a Galois closure with respect to an appropriate Galois correspondence defined by means of the Pontryagin dual of the underlying group. We prove that a topological abelian group G is maximally almost periodic if and only if every cyclic subgroup of G is -closed. This generalizes a property characterizing the circle group from (Studia Sci. Math. Hungar. 38 (2001) 97–113, A characterization of the circle group and the p-adic integers via sequential limit laws, preprint), and answers an appropriate version of a question posed in (A characterization of the circle group and the p-adic integers via sequential limit laws, preprint). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The concept of continuity of a duality (i.e., involutive contravariant endofunctor) of the category LR of locally compact modules over a discrete commutative ring R, was introduced by Prodanov. Orsatti and the first-named author proved that the category LR admits discontinuous dualities when R is a large field of characteristic zero. We prove that all dualities of LR are continuous when R=Q is the discrete field of rationals numbers, while this fails to be true for the discrete fields R and C of the real and of the complex numbers, respectively. More generally, we describe the finitely closed subcategories L of LQ such that all dualities of L are continuous. All dualities of such a category L turn out to be naturally equivalent to the Pontryagin duality. This property extends to R and C. The continuity of all dualities of LQ is related to the fact that the adele ring AQ of the rationals has no ring automorphisms beyond the identity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We answer a question of Raczkowski on totally bounded Hausdorff group topologies on the integers with a convergent sequence (un). More specifically, we show that for fast growing and for slowly growing sequences (un) the asymptotic behaviour of the ratio un+1/un leads to rather specific properties of the topologies in question. (a)If un+1/un→∞, then there exists a totally bounded Hausdorff group topology of weight c on Z that makes (un) converging to 0.(b)If un+1/un is bounded, then every group topology as in (a) must be metrizable (i.e., has weight ℵ0).We also show (under the assumption of Martin''s Axiom) that there exists a precompact group topology τ on Z without non-trivial convergent sequences generated by a measure-zero subgroup H of T. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Background: Bioconcentration factor (BCF) describes the behaviour of a chemical in terms of its likelihood of concentrating in organisms in the environment. It is a fundamental property in recent regulations, such as the European Community Regulation on chemicals and their safe use or the Globally Harmonized System for classification, labelling and packaging. These new regulations consider the possibility of reducing or waiving animal tests using alternative methods, such as in silico methods. This study assessed and validated the CAESAR predictive model for BCF in fish. Results: To validate the model, new experimental data were collected and used to create an external set, as a second validation set (a first validation exercise had been done just after model development). The performance of the model was compared with BCFBAF v3.00. For continuous values and for classification purposes the CAESAR BCF model gave better results than BCFBAF v3.00 for the chemicals in the applicability domain of the model. R2 and Q2 were good and accuracy in classification higher than 90%. Applying an offset of 0.5 to the compounds predicted with BCF close to the thresholds, the number of false negatives (the most dangerous errors) dropped considerably (less than 0.6% of chemicals). Conclusions: The CAESAR model for BCF is useful for regulatory purposes because it is robust, reliable and predictive. It is also fully transparent and documented and has a well-defined applicability domain, as required by REACH. The model is freely available on the CAESAR web site and easy to use. The reliability of the model reporting the six most similar compounds found in the CAESAR dataset, and their experimental and predicted values, can be evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]