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This paper aims to investigate the relationship between academia and society focusing on how technical universities perform Third Mission (TM) to promote knowledge outside the academic environment producing multiple benefits.

This investigation is performed through the conceptual approach. The theoretical background of the TM is explored through scientific literature review. It analyses a selected pool of experiences focused on Environmental and Sustainable Education (ESE). The study identifies significant aspects of two specific case studies, designed and implemented by the authors.

Outcomes show opportunities and limitations in the application of ESE on behalf of technical academia. The study suggests solutions, precautions and systemic changes to promote ESE for childhood as TM activity in technical engineering academia. These recommendations can be useful for policymakers to set academic goals and plan the strategic management of teaching, research and TM.

The paper focuses on the role of technical engineering universities and criticalities faced by academics to foster and perform ESE. Future perspectives aim to create new opportunities to strengthen the social impact of scientific and technical research by building bridges with childhood education.

Naples, Italy in the last decade has become a destination for Ukrainian migrants escaping the economic uncertainty of their homeland. A sign of the city's importance in the diaspora is that the Ukrainian government in 2008 opened a local consulate. Estimates are that nearly a million Ukrainians have used Italy as a point of labour transit, even if only a fifth of those are formally registered. The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategies with which Ukrainian migrants in Naples, Italy attempt to create ontological security in the context of informal economies and the uncertainties of the migratory process.

The research is based on 18 months of ethnographic close observation and participation in migrant networks in Naples between 2004 and 2008.

The research reveals the strategies used by Ukrainian migrants to arrange and maintain transnational connections, seek work, and develop a sense of belonging through place‐making and institutional development in the face of the significant barriers to inclusion and socio‐economic stability in Neapolitan society.

The evidence suggests that policymakers concerned with social cohesion and integration might wish to consider informal economic activities not simply as a “problem” to resolve but a key feature of contemporary capitalism that may create the conditions to address their concerns. Therefore, a more nuanced understanding of how migrants create their lives through these activities would be useful.

This ethnographic material suggests that greater attention should be paid to the creative capacities of migrants to create a sense of security through informal activities. Migrants make extensive use of social networks and knowledge distribution to form the basis of decisions about economic behaviour, emplacement and ontological security.

In this chapter I discuss judicial contributions to Italian penality. I look at the penal incentives produced by interactions between judicial and political classes, and ask whether judges and prosecutors have been forces for punitiveness or moderation. I discuss the relevance of the Italian case for broader analyses of Western penality.

My chapter offers a political-sociological account of judicial contributions to punishment. I analyse the penal incentives created by different national institutional set-ups, specifically addressing judicial contributions to penality using a framework developed by Joachim Savelsberg and Nicola Lacey. The framework examines judicial structure in the institutional context looking at the penal implications of bureaucratisation of the judiciary and the capacity for co-ordination between judges and politicians. I include judicial legitimacy as an additional dimension in this framework.

I conclude that the Italian judiciary have been forces for punitiveness and moderation. Their contributions can be systematised by looking at the waxing and waning of judicial legitimacy, and the consequent expansion and contraction of judicial powers. I claim that judicial legitimacy is also relevant to other (‘non-Italian’) analyses of judicial contributions to contemporary Western penality.

By adding legitimacy to investigations of judicial contributions to penality I provide an organising principle with which to analyse the penal role of Italian judicial actors. I thus allow Italy to be kept in conversation with existing comparative models, without assuming that it either conforms to the models entirely, or that the models should otherwise be eschewed. I use the Italian case to demonstrate the relevance of legitimacy when analysing judicial contributions to Western penality, arguing that changing legitimacy affects the terms and effect of interaction between judicial and political classes.