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In recent years, medical educators have increasingly incorporated comics into their teaching to promote humanism and empathy and to encourage reflective practice. However, it remains unclear how and to what extent comics-based courses effectively address persistent challenges in medical education, such as the need for more engaging, multimodal learning strategies and the cultivation of emotional intelligence alongside clinical competencies. The aim of this study is to investigate the experiences of students who have enrolled in courses on comics and medicine during medical school. Students in North America who had taken such a course during the previous 5 years were invited to participate in an interview about their experiences. 17 students from 10 different medical schools in North America were interviewed. To explore the students’ views on the value of such courses to their medical education, we used a constructivist grounded analytic approach, employing thematic analysis to understand and interpret our interview. Students reported that comics-based courses support key aspects of their medical training that traditional pedagogical approaches may overlook, such as fostering self-reflection, enhancing empathy, and encouraging creative engagement with complex medical narratives. Moreover, comics contributed to their individual and collective professional identity formation by providing a space for introspection and shared discourse.

The paper illustrates the results of a qualitative study conducted in Italy during the lockdown, and aimed at investigating the consequences of remote work on work-life balance and gender inequalities in the division of paid and unpaid labor within heterosexual couples. Drawing from 20 online in-depth interviews with 10 heterosexual couples, the paper highlights the expansion of work over other domains, which worsened with remote work. Even if for some interviewed men it was an occasion to experience a more involved fatherhood, for the majority of them a rethinking of their commitment in paid work is inconceivable. Conversely, mothers are more keen on considering job requests as negotiable and perceive a pervasive interference of work on family life, while their husbands often claim that childcare activities may reduce their productivity. Remote work does not allow the redefinition of the working models and does not improve the work-life balance of interviewed couples, which is still considerably unbalanced towards job, with a limited space and time for individual activities. Moreover, remote work, even in this unprecedented extreme situation, does not modify gender normative roles within domestic domain and thus it reproduces and sometimes exacerbates gender inequalities with women trying to balance their double role and fathers expanding the time devoted to work.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the comicisation of qualitative sociology, i.e., the use of comics as research methods and analytical tools in sociology, drawing from case studies related to illness and neurodivergence. In the first part, we will pinpoint how comics as qualitative research methods enhance the reflexivity of sociologists themselves in the various phases of their research projects: from the definition of a case study to the choice of research and analysis techniques up to the communication of research outputs. In line with El Refaie’s (2012) concept of pictorial embodiment, we will show how producing drawn versions of the self helps to both enhance extended reflexivity and engage with physicality. In the second part of the paper we will illustrate two research experiences, related to the interdisciplinary research area of the Graphic Medicine (Czerwiec et al., 2010). The selected case studies are particularly meaningful in two respects: first, they show how the use of comics in qualitative sociological research contributes to go beyond standard individualistic epistemologies and helps to highlight meso and macrostructural factors which are crucial to analyse social phenomena. Second, they shed light on how comics provide multiple opportunities to portray embodiment and reflect upon the social and cultural dimensions of embodiment processes, thanks to their language and socio-cultural specificities as a medium and cultural object. We will conclude with some reflections on how graphic narratives may be used in qualitative research to investigate how socially marginalised people experience daily interactions and social conditions.

This research project is aimed at identifying risk and protective factors of social withdrawal, by studying some areas of young people's psychological wellbeing. The study took place in a medium-sized town in the north-west of Italy. A total of 1,102 students participated in the study. An online survey was sent to all the students attending the second year of local high schools, then the results were combined with those from two focus groups involving young people and adults. The findings indicate that socio-cultural factors may be the reasons why social disengagement is so widespread. The societal pressure to be successful in every life domain may push young people, unable to conform, out of the competition. Bullying, negative school experiences and stress are associated with an over-investment of time on the internet, a harbinger of social isolation. This study's findings suggest the need to plan student initiatives, to identify the warning signals of the phenomenon.

The article deals with the restart of internal migrations in Italy, focusing on high skilled migrants, specifically young southern students who attend the university in Turin, in order to get educational credentials, useful for finding a job in the same town where they have studied or in another region, even abroad. The aim is to explore the phenomenon, by analyzing depth reasons and future plans of the displacement. The second topic is young people's self-concept change ana their relationship with family, friends and original context, because migration may induce a process of emancipation from parents and create a break with social and cultural background. Gender and social classes affect the experience, producing multiple pathways. Benefits of the DSU system reduce social inequalities on the opportunity to choose a college far away from home, since commuting seems to be a «survival strategy» of lower-class families, but recent budget cuts put in question the role of this pubnc institution.

The deduced amino acid sequence of a Drosophila gene isolated with a vertebrate sodium channel complementary DNA probe revealed an organization virtually identical to the vertebrate sodium channel protein; four homologous domains containing all putative membrane-spanning regions are repeated in tandem with connecting linkers of various sizes. All areas of the protein presumed to be critical for channel function show high evolutionary conservation. These include those proposed to function in voltage-sensitive gating, inactivation, and ion selectivity. All 24 putative gating charges of the vertebrate protein are in identical positions in the Drosophila gene. Ten introns interrupt the coding regions of the four homology units; introns with positions conserved among homology units bracket a region hypothesized to be the selectivity filter for the channel. The Drosophila gene maps to the right arm of the second chromosome in region 60D-E. This position does not coincide with any known mutations that confer behavioral phenotypes, but is close to the seizure locus (60A-B), which has been hypothesized to code for a voltage-sensitive sodium channel.

The widening, intensifying, speeding up, and growing impact of worldwide interconnectedness, better known as globalization is forcing countries and regions develop strategies to enhance their economies to better compete worldwide. Science, technology, engineering and innovation play a fundamental role in the creation of wealth, economic development and in the improvement of the quality of life for all citizens. This paper addresses the role of capacity building and engineering education as foundations to develop national/regional economic development strategies in Latin America. Contributors from various sectors (academia, non-governmental organizations, industry and government) share their roles, viewpoints and perspectives. There are many definitions of globalization. It can be thought as the process in which geographic distance becomes a factor of diminishing importance in the establishment and maintenance of cross-border economic, political, and socio-cultural relations or it can be thought of as the widening, intensifying, speeding up, and growing impact of worldwide interconnectedness [1]. But regardless of definitions, most agree that globalization has fundamentally transformed economies around the world. In this era, economic networks rather than political boundaries are the building blocks of prosperity and change. In the World is Flat, Tom Friedman [3] suggests how the world is in its 3rd globalization wave, one that is governed by people and communications. He states that the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and that countries, communities, individuals governments and societies can, and must, adapt to the challenges that this ‘flat world” presents. Thus, globalization is making both developed countries and those in development think about effective and efficient strategies that will advance their economic and social development agendas. Many countries around the world have made significant strides in the past ten years in laying the foundations for market economies and democratic societies to flourish. For many of them, that progress is now recognized worldwide. Countries like Taiwan, Singapore, and Ireland come to mind. Economic Development and Knowledge-Based Economies Economists and social scientists agree that economic development is a concept that is not easy to define, but most would agree that is relates to the restructuring of an economy to enhance social and economic well-being of a community, region, state, or nation and its citizens [1]. Competing in global economy demands that policy makers understand a new geographic scope and the predominant new drivers of growth: innovation and entrepreneurship. Countries whose economies have embraced these drivers can be thought as knowledge-based economies. A knowledge based economy is one that employs a region’s knowledge and educational resources to gain economic advantage across the whole value chain in the global economy. Thus, building