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Christina Jerne, "Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
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Marshall Poe
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Christina Yarne about her book titled Opposition by Imitation the Economics of Italian Anti Mafia Activism, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2025, examining a number of different forms of anti mafia activism. Things are being done by organizations by ordina people to explore obviously what the mafia is doing, but also kind of what people are doing in response to it. Some of which we're going to be talking about is kind of oppositional in a way. We might normally think about sort of saying don't do this. But a lot of it is a lot more intriguing than that because in some ways it looks like appropriating the things that the Mafia is doing, but for different purposes. So it's nuanced, it's intricate, it's interwoven with a lot of different things. Here we're going to be talking, I think, about some topics that maybe don't come to mind when one brings up the title of Mafia. So there's a lot to get into with this book, and I'm very much looking forward to our conversation. So, Christina, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Christina Yarne
Well, Miranda, thanks for your invitation, first of all, and for doing this incredible work for the scholarly community and for people who are just interested in nerding. I'm Christina Jane. I work as an associate professor at the University of Aarhus, and, yeah, I'm happy to be here, and I look forward to our conversation very much.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Wonderful. Well, I think before we get into the details of the book, we should do a bit of background about the project more broadly. So can you tell us more about sort of your own background and why you decided to write this book? Sort of the questions you came into with this project, how they develop to get to the point of a finished book?
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Dr. Christina Yarne
Yeah. Thanks. So I've always been interested in possibility, I guess, in agency questions of what we can do to make the world a better place. And I was really kind of fed up with approaches to economy in particular, that. That kind of speak of economy as a. As a system that there is no way out of. Usually this kind of argument or discourse takes the word capitalism or neoliberalism. And I was just dissatisfied with, and I guess even angry with the idea that there was no way out of here. Right. So I became more and more interested, interested in exploring what people were doing to change things or to make the world more livable. And then I encountered this really interesting object in a supermarket, actually, that was a package of pasta that said this package of pasta is 100% mafia free. And I thought, wow, what on earth does that mean? I mean, I've. I've met, you know, food that is fair trade. I've met food that is, you know, it doesn't do any cruelty on animals. All kinds of kind of ethics in food products, but. But Mafia free products, that was. That was really kind of striking to me. And I started to not only, you know, unpack this, this brand, which turned out to be, you know, a huge series of food products that oppose Mafia relations. But But I started to unpack different types of businesses or discover different kinds of businesses that refused to participate in mafia type relations, oppose them or challenge them in some way. And turned out that this is not just related to food, but it's anything from waste management to libraries, cooperatives, worker unions, a soap, soap factory even. I encountered. So all kinds of really interesting business models that in some way succeeded in creating mafia free livelihoods. So that's kind of where my interest started from. And then obviously, I guess it must be mentioned that I'm Italian myself and I left the country many years ago because. Exactly. I thought that there was no way out of relationships that were driven by corruption, nepotism, injustice, all kinds of oppressive work relations especially. And I got intrigued by these kinds of enterprises because they showed me that, well, that's not the case, there is a way out of here, and it's possible to live differently in that context. So that's really what this book is about. It's about what kinds of economic possibilities exist in the context of Italy, but also what kinds of possibilities exist these could also be used in different contexts that are not strictly defined by mafia type relations.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it definitely speaks to wider questions about corruption in economic relations. But I'm glad you mentioned the pasta, because that is definitely one of the things I was thinking of in that introduction a moment ago when I said sort of surprising things you weren't expecting to come across, because I certainly was not expecting to open the book and hear about pasta saying it was anti mafia. Like, that was a really interesting sort of rethink of the types of things that we do or don't associate with these sorts of questions. And in fact, that's a thread that you continue in the book. You do tell us about the pasta, but you don't just stop there about the rethink. You take us through terms like economic or political or even, of course, Mafia itself to sort of make sure that we are thinking critically about these terms, not just assuming that we know exactly what they mean. So can you maybe do a little bit of that examination here to help us sort of get into thinking about these relations beyond the sort of assumptions we might have from the media headlines, please.
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Dr. Christina Yarne
So I think I can start with the term Mafia, because that's in a sense, the easier one or the one that I really kind of had to confront while writing this book. So usually, especially in Anglophone context, when we hear the term mafia, what we imagine is a criminal organization, you know, a mob, say, a branch of Ndrangheta, or a specific group of illicit actors. But in the context of Italy, the term Mafia has a much broader kind of semantic field in the sense that, I mean, now people use the term Mafia to define anything bad really. So it can be anything from a kind of bully at school or an evil corporation. It's a really, really inflated term in a sense. So then I had to kind of find a middle ground because I saw that it was necessary to kind of define what it is that we're talking about here. So I really embraced the kind of emic use of the term, meaning that I followed what it was that these activists were talking about or what they meant when they talk about Mafia. And what's happened in the last, I'd say 20, 30 years is that the Mafia term has become pluralized in Italy, meaning that Mafia is not simply, you know, a defined as a group of criminals working in an organization, but it's a whole bunch of relationships that are, you know, oppressive in kind. So I kind of dug into also the history of this term and how it evolved within anti Mafia activism. And in this, I worked very closely with Professor Nando Dalla Chiesa, with whom we wrote this anthology. Well, based on his earlier work, actually I helped him translate it and kind of make it more contemporary where we trace how this understanding or how this term has evolved within anti Mafia activism. And it turns out that Mafia is really a kind of governance of which a specific criminal organization maybe is simply one part. So I talk about it as a kind of paralegal form of power. Paralegal, I mean that it's not simply illegal because it actually uses all kinds of legitimate forms of power from early on, feudal relations to nation state institutions, democratic institutions, but also corporations and formal laws to kind of enforce their power. So it's kind of this paralegal kind of governance that exploits legitimate forms of power to its own use. So Mafia is really in this sense a much broader kind of concept that I think can be really useful for other contexts as well that don't necessarily have a relationship to Italy at all. Because there's illegal and paralegal forms of governance exist all over the world. And in fact they might be the dominant or the majority of the world might actually be led this way. So this is why I hope that this book can speak to different contexts now. The terms economy and politics kind of. I also had to deal with these terms in this book because what I particularly focus on within this really long social movement that started in the late 19th century is that in the last say 30 years, 20 years especially. This movement has taken an economic turn in the sense that it's become more and more. One of its strategies, at least one of its aspects, the one I explore is really about economic relations. So trade, commerce, marketing, work relations. And so then when I started to kind of make sense of this, this. This new kind of repertoire of this movement, and I looked into the literature of, and particularly literature on collective action and the sociology of social movements, what I found was that the term economy has. Has a very specific connotation, and in a way, it kind of travels on a side, on. On a track that's parallel. So, for instance, when we talk about social movements, we often either see economy as something that's above the social movement. In this case, we can think of, say, an economic structure, say something oppressive, say capitalism, that then the social movement has to, in a sense, kind of oppose or critique politically. So it's something that's above the social movement. And then there's another version that kind of talks about economy as something that's below politics. So in this sense, economy would be kind of reduced to money and resources that we need in order to do political action, right? So I said, well, none of those two things or none of those two versions of economy really fit with this type of activism where economic action, such as choosing how to pay a worker or who to exchange services and goods with, or how to sell or brand even a specific thing, how those actions are in the themselves, political. So I really draw on the work of two economic geographers called J.K. gibson Graham, who in the late 1990s, kind of theorized the end of capitalism as we knew it. And all of their work is really about deconstructing economy as a site of. Of oppression and as something that's inherently capitalistic. And what they illustrate is there's tons of different ways in which people around the world have always done economy that have nothing to do with capitalism. And their whole project has been about really kind of taking stock of these types of. Of economic relations and illustrating how these. These types of economic actions and moments are sites of political decision always. So in that I really found inspiration there and try to build on their work and kind of trace how economic life is made and how it's made durable, how it's made to last, and what also the difficulties are in forcing those kinds of relationships.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So this is exactly, I think, where we want to go to next, because you've laid out for us kind of the complexity of the thinking behind all of this. Let's get into some practical examples. When, for example, do we see anti Mafia activism starting? What are the kinds of things we see? I mean, it has to start somewhere, right? So where does it begin? What does it look like in these early stages of people trying to grapple with these questions of what economic and political relations look like?
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Dr. Christina Yarne
Yeah, well, this is, as I said, a really long standing social movement. And I guess the most crucial question to ask is when can we start talking about Mafia? And most historians, criminologists, agree with the fact that the Mafia is really something that we can begin to talk about. Essentially when the Italian nation state was built. Because before we had a nation state, so we're talking about the late 19th century in the Italian case, then sort of intimidatory relations and oppressive relationships that could resemble Mafias were not considered pathological, but they were simply the norm. So then when we have the state building project that emerges in this period, then we start seeing this issue really being born amongst activists as well. So I'd say, well, many scholars agree that the first kinds of mobilizations against these kinds of power can be traced back to the late 19th century. And they took the form of essentially peasant revolts. And here we have the Sicilian Workers Leagues as the biggest example, the Fasci Siciliani, which kind of saw a lot of peasants obviously trying to improve their own, their own work life. Right? Because at that time we had like a really feudal type of economy in the south of Italy. And the aristocracy and the landowners kind of had these middlemen that managed their estates called the gabelotti. And these figures were kind of, well, took advantage of this position that they had in administrating this land and basically ensured that none of the surplus was actually given out to, to the farmers. So they kept them in real conditions of poverty and then they took everything for themselves. So these first kind of moments here we see really classic kind of socialist revolts with political parties, but also the beginning of a kind of proto cooperative form where you see kind of workers and peasants uniting and trying to eliminate these intermediate intermediaries in a way that allowed them to benefit from the produce of their work and essentially have better lives. So I mean, why is this an example of anti Mafia? Essentially because. And not just, you know, anti feudalism? Well, first of all, because some of the members of these movements actually talked about these entrepreneurs, these gapelotti, as Mafia, but also because they talked about. There was already a discourse at the time that was essentially about crime prevention. Right? So crime being the result of, in this case of poverty and horrible living conditions that led people to desperately seek other means of income and made it easier for them to turn to violence. So in this initial phase, it was really about agriculture and improving work conditions for farmers.
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Dr. Christina Yarne
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's really interesting to understand because as you go closer to the present in the book as well, we come back to these questions about farmers and agriculture. So that's good to understand that that's kind of really early as a thread because it does continue so much. But I do want us to fast forward through time a little bit as much as what you're telling us is interesting. This isn't just a historical question. There's some more recent things too. So what for example, do we see if we move to like the 1990s, you talk about, if I'm not mistaken, sort of a bit of an expansion of anti mafia activism at this point.
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Dr. Christina Yarne
That's right. So in the 1990s, I'd say that this question, which through the long history that I trace it becomes bigger and smaller, more felt, less felt. In the 1990s, it kind of becomes first of all a national issue and not just something that's relegated to to the south of Italy or to some particular regions. It becomes normal to talk about mafia as a problem. Right. And before that, before the 1990s, I mean, the press even denied that Mafia existed, right? So we have a really important turn in the 1990s. And I think that happened as a result of two things. So the first is definitely a massive collective trauma that happened in the early 90s, and that is the murder and tragic deaths of two judges, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and their, and their police protectors. And these, these two judges were murdered because of their impressive efforts to incarcerate hundreds of members of Cosa Nostra. They, they, they started this maxi trial which was, you know, insane. And, and importantly, this trial and this whole process against Cosa Nostra was mediatized, right? So all of a sudden the whole nation is watching these two men and you know, their pool of judges successfully put a lot of bosses behind, behind bars. And then after a few years, 92 these, these men were murdered with TNT, like massive, you know, terrorist explosions. So all of a sudden, you know, the whole nation is watching and it becomes a sort of national issue because what's at stake is all of a sudden not just some individuals that stood up to Mafia, but it's a whole institution. It's the law that's under attack. So this was a huge moment which many activists refer to as their own 9 11. So this kind of spurred a whole bunch of demonstrations of different interesting kinds of activism across the country. And then this was also a period which we can colloquially refer to as the Second Republic. So before this era, politically, there was the era of, of really big parties, right? So Christian Democrat Party, Communist Party were really powerful. And then there was a huge corruption scandal that really also disintegrated the public's trust, I think, in institutions to a larger extent than it had done before. And then we have the beginning of the, the Bellusconian era, which kind of further mediatized corruption. And then we enter this realm or this era of, I guess, not only mistrust towards institutions, but the politicization of the everyday. The 1990s is a period where not only is anti Mafia activism increasing, but all kinds of different types of activism increases or spreads in much more kind of grassroots, associative form than say, political parties were before that. So we have a period in which, especially in the south of Italy, there's a massive peak in people just getting together and organizing against all kinds of issues and just doing, doing, you know, changing things with their own hands.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And are those the same sorts of things that we see now, for example? I mean, that's quite a range that you're describing there is that those sorts of the trends that we've got with these organizations today.
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Dr. Christina Yarne
Yeah, for sure. I mean this is, I think today we have an insane amount of associations, cooperatives, consumer unions that you know, have, have really grown and consolidated since, since those years. And a lot of them are kind of focused on education, on kind of creating a culture, a pedagogy of especially lawfulness. This is a legality, this is a really important term within this movement. Then there's also a growth or consolidation I guess of commemorative initiatives. So there's a lot of memory work being done in this, within this movement that is very much tied to the central figure of the family relative of the mafia victim. So people who are related to people who were murdered by Mafia either because they were personally against mafia or because they just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There's a lot of victims that died this way. So there's, every year there's a kind of annual commemoration ceremony that now has been actually institutionally recognized as the day of Mafia victims, which is really, really important. And then the last kind of trend is that there's, there's a whole bunch of entrepreneurial action that is. So it's not just associations that we're talking about, it's actually businesses. And this has really exploded I'd say since the 2000s. Right. So since the turn of the millennium. And that's the particular aspect of this activism that my book focuses on. And if we just look at some, some numbers, there's currently 36,616 mafia assets that are confiscated. So Mafia assets being things that belonged to mafia that have been taken away by them. And this can be anything from a supermarket, a factory, a shop, an apartment, a villa. And, and thanks to a law that was enforced in 1996 as a result of an incredible petition and collective action, now it's possible for people to take these in their own hands and manage them. So it's state property because it's still preventively confiscated, but it's managed by the collective. So, so this is really, really to me fascinating that there's you know, thousands of associations managing these, these types of businesses and you know, hundreds of people really mainly kind of middle class, well educated individuals, but a lot of young people especially involved in managing these assets and obviously also working with farmers and blue collar workers to keep these economies alive. Because what happens when you take a business and confiscate it from mafias is that great these mafias wealth is tackled. But what about all of the, all of the relationships and all of the social. Well, all of the, all of the livelihoods that depended on these businesses. What happens then? Right. If the state has it in its hands, then these people essentially don't have that livelihood anymore. So with this type of law, then it's possible to kind of keep those things alive and make sure that those people have, have an income and you generate different types of economic relations on them. So that's really a massive shift in what's happened. And I think one of the most interesting aspects to me of this movement currently.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it is really quite interesting. So I wonder if we can go into a bit more detail about kind of what this means on the ground. Both because it's really interesting, but also because. Because you've literally been on the ground, you have actually gone and interacted with these people and done some of this activism work yourself. So can you maybe give us some examples of kind of efforts that are taking place even now in this sort of sphere?
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Dr. Christina Yarne
Sure, yeah. So as you mentioned, my own kind of methodology to understand these economies was to enroll in them and be part of, be part of making them real. Right. So I started out by volunteering on several anti Mafia farms and buildings. So for, in Sicily, for instance, I was part of. I worked on a farm that was confiscated from Giovanni Brusca, which is a mafia boss that is very famous for his uncountable murders and ruthless ways. He's colloquially called Lovero, which means the swine. And basically what we did there was to just kind of tend to these fields. And it was July at that point, so it wasn't ready for harvest yet. But we just mended the buildings, we slept there, we cleaned, cleaned the land and did a lot of also educational work throughout the day. I also worked on another asset in Puglia, where there's a lot of, historically a lot of seasonal work coming in from West Africa and Eastern Europe. So in that context, tomatoes and wheat also are a big, are a big crop where these people are employed. But often these migrants are employed in conditions of semi slavery and some of them are trafficked. So the work there was not only to build or to harvest these tomatoes, but it was also to kind of connect to people who either had been trafficked or, or who were living in a kind of very precarious, to say the least situation. And they were basically had no way of moving out of these gang, mastering relations. So it's a huge problem in that area. So I mean, there's tons of different examples Tourism is another one where, which we might touch into later. I was also part of building or experiencing sites of Mafia heritage and also anti Mafia heritage. And I brought my own students to walk on these guided tours and provided feedback to these tourist initiatives that, you know, sought to sensitize people to, to these, to these issues by simply taking them there. And yeah, so we, we donated our work, our money, our time and, and the skills that, you know, we have. So this is, this is how I, I kind of worked on these in these places.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that's definitely helpful to understand and especially because tourism is such a big part of, I think, outsiders mentality of Italy and interaction with Italy as well. Let's talk more about that. I mean, taking your students and sensitizing them is really interesting. What else should we understand about tourism in the ways that it can or maybe has limits in kind of doing this sort of disruption of Mafia activity?
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Dr. Christina Yarne
Yeah, well, tourism was really, well, is a really big resource in this context. So one of the main kind of analytical ideas in this book is that essentially what these enterprises are doing is that they're imitating. The work the mafia does of controlling a population through different means. And one of the strategies Mafia has is to capitalize on people's emotions and mobilize people's emotions, particularly fear, but also other emotions such as pride, contempt, vanity that we might term as omerta. So activists have realized this and like, okay, so they're kind of drawing on people's emotions to get consensus. Why don't we do the same thing? So essentially what these tourism initiatives do in my view is to imitate this work of social control through emotions, but then to reframe to, to re. To orient people away from Mafia. So, so for instance, they, there's, there's one fantastic enterprise called Adiopizo, which means Farewell protection money. That basically started out as with an idea. A few friends was looking to open, I think a bar in Palermo and they were writing their budget out and they're like, we need to buy this and this and this and we need to count extortion money as part of our budget. We have to pay protection money to these local mafias. And they're like, why do we have to do this? Is this really necessary? And why is this an assumption that this is part of our budget? So then they started to get together and they stuck a bunch of stickers around the city that said a whole people that pays protection money is a people without dignity. And this kind of went viral right in a really Lo fi sense. It was really before social media and people started to talk about this, why should we do this? So then they started to really capitalize on people shock and rage and did an incredible work of social or of mobilization. And they got through an interesting process, a lot of consumers to sign a list or to sign a kind of declaration that said that they would be willing to buy products that were certified as not paying extortion money. And then they went to a whole bunch of businesses and said, hey, look, there's thousands of people who'd be willing to buy your stuff if you refuse to pay extortion money. Why don't you join our community, our network of producers? And they were. And you know, and with time, they managed to, to create a brand that is, you know, that, that, that refuses to pay protection money and that supports people in the process of, of, you know, saying no to protection money. Because that's obviously not just something you stop doing from one day to another. There's, there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of threats and, and difficulties that come with that choice. And then, you know, in 2000, in 2006, then. This whole network of people that refused to pay protection money became activists, wanted to kind of increase the amount of people that, that bought these products. So they said, well, why don't we connect these things on these products to one another through the use of tourism, right? Why don't we, why don't we attract people from other places to come and consume these goods and services? And then they started to kind of become a tour operator. And they connected hotels, buses, food enterprises in a way that, that creates a kind of critical tourism. And on top of that, then they've developed incredible walking tours and programs that you can do throughout the day, which include visiting of sites that had an importance for mafia history. So they show you the tragedy and they try to. Make you sad in a way and share their own trauma. But also they include you in joyful places for these movements. They look like this bar here was where this all started. And we come here and we celebrate and we eat together and come be part of this movement. So tourism is really, I really think tourism has, I mean, a lot of potentials to mobilize not just people's emotion and awareness, but also resources. So tourism is often views as a kind of sector that obviously has a lot of problematic consequences for a lot of communities, for ecosystems and so forth. But tourism isn't just a sector. It's actually a way of relating to the world that also has a lot of opportunities and possibilities, as I think is very clear in the case of Adiopizo and of other tourism initiatives that I've observed around the world.
- [45:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, I think there's potential here is really key and potential with acknowledgement of sort of the context in which it needs to be situated, as you've just described. And really, I think quite obviously tourism is one of the aspects that has potential to go well beyond pushing back against mafia and corruption in Italy. And I know you've made that point multiple times in our conversation, that your investigation is focused on Italy in a way, however, that can highlight implications and potential usefulness for this sort of thing. Well, beyond that. So do we want to talk about that in a bit more detail, the ways in which you see some of the implications and possibilities that could lead from this research?
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Dr. Christina Yarne
Definitely. I think that there's a lot that can be learned from these strategies that these incredible activists are implementing. And I think analytically I've worked with this idea of opposition by imitation. So the idea is that. In order to fight something oppressive, it's perhaps wise to also. To also look at what those kinds of powers, whatever they are and wherever they are, what is it that they actually afford as well, what is it that makes them work and where do they get the legitimacy from? I mean, that's just not something that falls from the sky. There's a reason why certain things are in power and certain people are in power. And, you know, instead of critiquing those and relegating or limiting oneself to protesting or to making demands to other actors, such as, you know, politicians or corporations, to make a change. I think what this type of activism really stimulates me to think with, at least is. Is to kind of, well, to work with what these powers can do and then try to do the same thing, but through a reformulation. And that can be material rearrangement of things, it can be effective. I mean, if we look at what's happening in the United States, for example, right now, I mean, what is it that's. That the Trumpians have really gotten right? It's their capacity to move people through shock, right? Through aesthetic shock, through. I mean, they're great with social media. They work. They've just tapped into the language of TikTok. And so I think, for instance, activists might learn from that and be like, okay, this is. This type of communication is able to move people. Why don't we use the same type of communication to communicate differently? That's just one example. But I Mean, there's so much that can be learned from this movement. And I think the key or the central thing is to recognize, well, what is it? What role do we each as individuals play in enforcing the kind of power structure, what is available to us, what kind of agency is available to us? And just recognizing that we are all capable to different extents, of course, and to different levels of changing things. And of course, getting together and collectively organizing is necessary. It can't just be reduced to an individual action. But I think these types of activism have a lot to teach us in making better worlds possible. And I think mimicry for me is a central notion that I'm continuously thinking about that can be useful in different places and for different reasons. But, you know, opposing something by doing the same thing just differently is something that I think can be valuable.
- [50:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So I suppose more directly, I mean, to some extent, that answer included kind of a call to arms, which I think is worth highlighting. So what do you most hope readers or listeners of this conversation kind of. Of most take away from this or most think about going and trying to implement in their own lives?
- [50:27]
Dr. Christina Yarne
I think, first of all, reflecting on one's own capacities and possibilities and, and moving away from the idea that politics is something that is outside of us and that is. Is tied to the nation state, but that we all have a reservoir of economic agency, of political agency that we can tap into. And most likely, we already are having many political effects on our communities and on our lives, on our territories in different ways. So I think the call to arms is to kind of think about that. What kind of oppressive relationships exist in your life? What role do you play in them? And what would it mean? Or what would a mimicry, an oppositional mimicry look like in your particular context? What would it look like for you to say you're in a workshop relationship? That's, that's really. That you disagree with fundamentally. What role do you play in enforcing that? And what, what would it. What kinds of, what kinds of things can you actually learn from those oppressive relationships? And how can you use that to transform them? Right, That's. I think it's really a. A question of. Of recognizing what's already there. Not only what is wrong with the world and not only what's impossible, but what opportunities are there. And there's tons of examples in this book of interesting ways of organizing.
- [52:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I definitely think that's a good summary of fascinating things in the book as well as a useful reiteration of this point. That kind of. Of, yes, the book is about Italy, but it's also about a lot more than that too. So I think that's probably a good place to wrap up our discussion about the book. Leaving me with just a final question of what you might be working on thinking about now that it's done. This is quite obviously something that I think you're going to continue to be interested in, but what is sort of on the horizon for you, whether or not it's a book?
- [53:02]
Dr. Christina Yarne
Oh yeah. Well, that's a good question. So. So I'm actually currently writing another book with a great colleague called Casper Tang Vankila, and it's in a way very related to this book. It's about the turn to life within economic action. So what we have been questioning ourselves or what we've been curious about is that there's an explosion of different paradigms, models that are enhancing, that put the enhancement of life or the betterment of living conditions at the center of economy. So rather than profit and growth, which have been kind of the main answers to the betterment of social life in Western economic discourse, there's a whole bunch of initiatives named post growth donut economies, buen vivir black social economies. There's tons of there's an explosion of different initiatives that are emerging all around the world that kind of move beyond criticizing what's wrong with the world and kind of try to envision different futures. And the book is really about what it means for life to be at the center of economic discourse and the betterment of life rather than profit and growth, and what the challenges and possibilities are in realizing these kinds of economies. So it's kind of a follow up of this. This is a particular example of putting well being at the center of collective action. Whereas this new book moves beyond the Mafia specificity. It so it's more a question of what that implies and what the possibilities are inherent in that. But, you know, still sticking to possibilities. I think we need a lot of hope right now.
- [55:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds like an intriguing project. And of course, for any listeners who want to learn more about everything we've been talking about, want more possibilities, they can of course, read the book we've been discussing titled Opposition by the Economics of Italian Anti Mafia Activism, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2025. Cristina, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [55:37]
Dr. Christina Yarne
Thank you, Miranda. It's been a pleasure talking with.