Conny Russo
Concetta Russo is an Associate Professor of General Sociology at Guglielmo Marconi University. Throughout her career, she has conducted research in Cuba, Australia, and Italy on issues related to health and job insecurity. Her work has appeared in national and international journals, addressing topics such as the relationship between academic precarity and reproductive choices, the link between economic insecurity and mental well-being, and the impact of premature birth on parents’ socio-psychological health. In recent years, she has focused her attention on methodological innovation in the social sciences, with a particular emphasis on participatory research techniques and the use of visual tools to explore complex social phenomena. She has also contributed to debates on the role of digitally mediated communication in qualitative inquiry.
Address: Milano, Lombardia, Italy
Address: Milano, Lombardia, Italy
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Papers by Conny Russo
navigating such a complicated life transition—while pursuing
an academic career impacts the way female researchers
perceive themselves as acting subjects. By analyzing indepth
virtual interviews with Italian female early career
researchers, this work explores the relationship between
fertility decisions, motherhood hardships, self‐identity, and
career‐related experiences in the interviewees' biographical
trajectories. Despite their consideration of
childbearing as a mental and practical obstacle to scientific
production, many of the interviewees ascribe positive
career outcomes to the arrival of their first child. The
reflexivity set in motion by the interview process allows us
to observe the collected interviews as double‐layered
narratives. The postponement of fertility choices and the
presence of work‐family conflict tend to be described as
ordinary facets of a common career pattern, intrinsic to the
female academic working experience. Meanwhile, the positive
impacts of motherhood on self‐identity and workrelated
skills are recounted on a more individual level,
framed as a sort of paradox, a personal journey of selfdiscovery
or—to some extent ‐ a heroic performance.
conducted in the city of Havana which lasted about eight months.
In this essay, I analyze what the use of escoazul reveals about the society that produces it and the one that, despite difficulties in getting it, makes a remarkable use of it for therapeutic reason. Indeed, if it is true that the act of taking medicine involves more than the embodiment of a substance, and it reproduces health ideology (Nichter & Vuckovic 1994), it is interesting to understand what kind of health ideologies about medical pluralism are reproduced through taking escoazul as a medicine in the Cuban health system, and doing it in Italy, as an alternative strategy of self-medication.
The case of escoazul seems to suggest there are two different ways to intend pluralism: one based of the ability (or lack of ability) of the State to handle the coexistence of different medical traditions, the other referred to the dynamic, discontinuous and fragmentary process which involves complex negotiation of social identity and morality, that the anthropology calls “health seeking behaviour” (Kleinman 1980). Finally, I shed light on the idea that medical pluralism has to do with the possibility to make a choice about one’s health inside and outside state-regulated
categories.
Key words: escoazul, traditional medicine, Cuba, Italy, health-seeking behaviour.
then the most popular form of belief in the country, this article aims to explain in which ways it has been contributing to the informal economy and to the black market grown. I consider under the definition of «informal
economy» all the work-practices that do not cope with State regulations, because the workers do not have any licenses or/and do not pay any taxes. Santeria crosses informal economy in many ways, and consequently, I
want to argue, it takes part to the ongoing changes that are reconfiguring contemporary Cuban society.