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Back to School
Dear Students, Happy to meet you again after all this extremely challenging time! I hope you are well and that Covid-19 hasn’t been too difficult to face for you and your families. I’d like to greet your back to school days with this wonderful poem by Black American poet Amanda Gorman, The Miracle of Morning (April 2020), a hymn to solidarity, empathy and optimism even in the tragic times we have experienced. Let’s read it scrolling down this page or listen to it together clicking on this link and discuss it. Enjoy the poem and the new school year! I thought I’d awaken to a world in mourning. Heavy clouds crowding, a society storming. But there’s something different on this golden morning. Something magical in the sunlight, wide and warming. I see a dad with a stroller taking a jog. Across the street, a bright-eyed girl chases her dog. A grandma on a porch fingers her rosaries. She grins as her young neighbor brings her groceries. Wh...
A Day for Critical Foodies
There was an interesting conference on food design yesterday in the school where I currently teach. The pretext was the presentation of a book titled ‘La cucina di design. Cibo, tendenze, moda’ by a dear colleague and friend of mine, Loredana La Fortuna. The topic was food design, an issue analyzed from the critical lenses of social semiotics, definitely an unusal perspective for the students of a ‘Professionale Alberghiero’. Food is not just what we eat. It is a language and, as such, it can express several meanings concerning family and national traditions, lifestyle, environment, hierarchies, gender roles, religion, cultural politics and ... Art, as Loredana’s book highlights. Therefore, studying food means studying culture. I really recommend the reading of this book edited by Progedit (Bari 2016) to all the students and people interested in deconstructing the contemporary trend of ‘foodism’. Thanks a lot to all the participants to yesterday’s school even...
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