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What causes alcohol abuse and domestic violence and how can we stop them? These behaviors have multiple determinants, making the effects of changes in wife's and husband's income ambiguous. This paper estimates the effects of exogenous changes in wife's and husband's income on husband alcohol abuse and alcohol-induced violence using new data from rural Mexico. A long-lasting 20 dollar monthly increase in wife income decreases husbands' alcohol abuse by 15% and aggressive behavior by 21%; the extra money increase the wife's freedom and security, is spent on individual and household goods, and it crowds out transfers from the husband only for 5% of the wives whose income increases. Alcohol abuse and violence are insensitive to short-term fluctuations in husband's income. These findings suggest that the wife uses her higher income to reduce the consumption of goods that lower her utility, that alcohol abuse responds more to changes in permanent than in temporary income, and that targeting women as recipients of micro-credit or of other welfare programs may have beneficial effects in reducing alcohol dependence and domestic violence.

Timur Si-Qin's work elaborates links between virtual reality and spirituality in a peculiar way. In a context of cultural transformation that sees digital religions as expressions of faith, with virtual reality as their recent development, his works are placed as a bright political intervention aimed at promoting ethical change. Timur Si-Qin's project New Peace is a new protocol for a post-secular and inclusive faith in the real that fosters a spiritual relationship with matter. New Peace employs branding and multiple mediums, including virtual reality, as cognitive access tools that benefit from human propensity for spiritual thinking. The article focuses on his work A New Protocol VR (2018), an immersive experience in which the user falls into a vast desert landscape. Here the ethical contents of New Peace are conveyed as he/she connects to Pray to Scale, a spring of meditation on vastness, one of the four sources of spiritual emotion conceived by the artist. In investigating the relationship between virtual reality and spirituality, a debate emerges showing different visions of the medium as a vehicle for spiritual experiences. These visions are the background to the artist's peculiar artistic-philosophical perspectives in which he aims at overcoming a vision of the digital as immaterial-disembodied and presents a unifying subject-object, mind-world, and spirit-matter outlook placed in the emergencies of present time. ; L'opera di Timur Si-Qin elabora in maniera singolare i legami tra realtà virtuale e spiritualità.In un contesto di trasformazione culturale in cui le religioni digitali risultano espressioni di fede, delle quali la realtà virtuale è recente sviluppo, i suoi lavori si situano come un lucido intervento dai decisi risvolti politici mirato a favorire un cambiamento etico. Il progetto New Peace è un nuovo protocollo per una fede post-secolare e inclusiva nel reale che promuove un rapporto spirituale con la materia. New Peace impiega il branding e molteplici medium, tra cui la realtà virtuale, come strumenti di accesso cognitivo che si avvalgono della propensione umana per il pensiero spirituale. L'articolo si incentra sull'opera A New Protocol VR (2018), un'esperienza immersiva in cui l'utente si cala in uno sconfinato paesaggio desertico. Qui gli vengono trasmessi i contenuti etici di New Peace mentre si connette a Pray to Scale, fonte meditativa sulla vastità, una delle quattro sorgenti di emozione spirituale concepite dall'artista. Nell'indagare la relazione tra realtà virtuale e spiritualità si interseca un dibattito che emerge da differenti visioni del medium come veicolo di esperienze spirituali. Esse fanno da sfondo alle peculiari prospettive artistico-filosofiche dell'artista nelle quali mira a superare una visione del digitale come immateriale-disincarnato e presenta un'ottica che unifica soggetto-oggetto, mente-mondo e spirito-materia situata nelle emergenze del presente.

This article aims to highlight the emergence of urban citizenship spaces in two European cities—Milan, Italy, and Rotterdam, the Netherlands—where marginality and social exclusion are faced and coped with through social participation, appropriation of space, and the construction of a peculiar place-based sense of belonging. To do so, the article will present the results of comparative research conducted in Milan and Rotterdam by means of 60 semi-structured interviews (30 in each city) with inhabitants of peculiar neighbourhoods in the two cities. The analysis will adopt an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1989), paying attention to the intersection between personal characteristics and spatial features to highlight the processes occurring at the crossroads between the social and spatial categories. In particular, this work will present two examples, one from each city involved in the research, in which urban citizenship practices are enacted and create a Lefebvrian space of representation where dominant discourses and narratives are overcome and overturned by people otherwise excluded from dominant spaces and mainstream forms of urban citizenship. A comparison of the fieldwork from the two cities shows how in both cases, subaltern and/or marginalised groups (women, the poor, and migrants in particular) manage to appropriate interstitial spaces within the city where they can find room for expression and well-being and for the performance of urban citizenship practices. At the same time, though, external (political and economic) factors can transform those spaces of representation into self-constraining places which can expose these marginal groups to further vulnerability.

This article is a study of the nexus between voice, technology and vocal enunciation in the work of AGF (aka Antye Greie-Ripatti), an electronic musician, producer, composer and singer based in Hailuoto, Finland. It offers a definition of AGF's 'poemproducing', a technique, practice and poetic that radically challenges the centrality of 'human' and embodied voice in enunciation and instead thinks voice as immediately entangled in the complex web of a natural/cultural linguistic/technological apparatus. Starting from this definition, the article discusses the aesthetic and political consequences of this approach, focussing on its most radical example the album Source Voice (2013), read through Giorgio Agamben's definition of gesture and means without ends.

In this contribution I will not try to make a case for a particular definition of revolution, or revolutionary practice in or outside the Arts. Instead, I will attempt to outline a few theoretical, aesthetic and in a general sense political issues, arising when art - in this case cinema and the performing arts - tries to radically think itself as work that is both constituted inside, and yet working against an apparatus.