This article analyzes migrant agricultural labor in southern Italy, focusing on migrants from Burkina Faso and Romania laboring in the regions of Puglia and Basilicata. The argument underlines the connections between mobility, willingness to work for low wages, and conflict in the workplace. The essay investigates, firstly, why migrants are willing to work for lower wages than established in collective agreements. Migrants’ deportability explains the situation to some extent, but it does not answer the question completely; EU citizens (such as Romanians) who are not deportable also settle for lower salaries. Other factors include competition within the job market between day laborers from different countries and with different legal statuses, the segregation of seasonal workers from the local population, and the impact of the caporalato (gang-master) system, an illegal form of mediation and labor organization. The essay analyzes, secondly, the conflicts instigated by the day laborers, from clashes in the workplace to larger-scale mobilizations, including the biggest strike ever organized by foreign day laborers in Italy, which took place in Nardò in 2011; in this instance, breaking the migrants’ segregation was a key factor. Paradoxically, Romanians, who enjoy greater freedom of movement, seem less willing to engage in clashes in the workplace than Burkinabés (natives of Burkina Faso), despite the latter’s more precarious legal position. The research for this article was conducted between 2010 and 2013, both through interviews with day laborers, labor contractors, agricultural business owners, and expert witnesses and through an ethnographic study of migrant accommodations.

This article contributes to the debate on the rural dimensions of the current global surge of right-wing populism through an analysis and genealogy of the political discourse of Matteo Salvini's Lega on agriculture and migrant farm labour. In 2018-2019, this party emerged as one of the most successful radical right populist parties in Italy and Western Europe. After a description of the Italian political debate in the fields of agriculture and migration over the last two decades, we analyse how the issues of agriculture, food and migrant farm labour are articulated in the Lega's discourse in relation to the ideological features of nativism, authoritarianism, populism as well as neomercantilism and corporatism. We argue that agriculture and food are central in the representation of the 'Italian' cultural identity as proposed by the Lega. Moreover, we contend that the Lega has disarticulated and rearticulated 'old' ideas-such as the protection of 'Made in Italy' foodin a 'new' nativist discourse. The article is based upon a discourse analysis of speeches and documents produced by this party since 2013.

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User-generated content (e.g., tweets and profile descriptions) and shared content between users (e.g., news articles) reflect a user's online identity. This paper investigates whether correlations between user-generated and user-shared content can be leveraged for detecting disinformation in online news articles. We develop a multimodal learning algorithm for disinformation detection. The latent representations of news articles and user-generated content allow that during training the model is guided by the profile of users who prefer content similar to the news article that is evaluated, and this effect is reinforced if that content is shared among different users. By only leveraging user information during model optimization, the model does not rely on user profiling when predicting an article's veracity. The algorithm is successfully applied to three widely used neural classifiers, and results are obtained on different datasets. Visualization techniques show that the proposed model learns feature representations of unseen news articles that better discriminate between fake and real news texts.