You Must Be Crazy! Fostering Solidarity and Political Participation in the City of Naples through Grassroots Self-Management

Abstract

This thesis aims to outline, by way of a thorough ethnographic analysis, an attempt to develop political engagement and values such as community resilience, mutualism, and political participation within the urban environment of the city of Naples. The thesis investigates the practices of the social movement "Ex-OPG - Je so' pazzo" addressed to the creation of a local community in which the needs of the population are the starting point of a "socio-political laboratory" that aims to develop a political project able to fight social marginality and exclusion. By reusing a former symbol of State repression like an abandoned ex-asylum, the social movement subject of this research managed to use the building's symbolic capital to foster practices of solidarity and knowledge-building; thereby enhancing the political consciousness of the social actors involved as well as improving their material needs. Such practices work not only as a form of resistance to the depoliticizing and individualizing late-capitalist ideology, but also, as it will be detailed by empirical data, as a forge of political meanings necessary for the implementation of radical alternatives to the one framed by the hegemonic ideology.