The teaching of Social history aims to analyze the transformations related to the structures of contemporary societies, movements, classes, conditions of work and ways of life, families, local communities, urbanization, mobility, ethnic groups. The course therefore highlights the relationships between social, cultural and economic processes and social structures, as well as their impact on political institutions, the distribution of resources, social movements, shared worldviews, and forms of public and private behavior.
By the study of Social History the student will be able to achieve the following training objectives.
- Knowledge and understanding:
The student will be able to investigate cultures, mentalities, places, that – starting from second after war – cted as sensors / receptors of the messages that changed the system of values and needs: civil rights movements, politics of memory, school, family relationships, religious dissent, discourses on the body and sexuality, youth identity, exemplary spaces of the battle for the promotion of personal freedoms at the foundation of the citizens' statute.
- Applying knowledge and understanding:
The student will be able to to analyze, by the means of oral and audiovisual sources, the social dynamics, on the border between the public and private spheres, which led to the formation of a democratic, effective and supportive citizenship. Students are indeed actively involved in workshop-exercises based on the audiovisual repertoires (with the plurality
of mediums available, from documentaries to cinema, from sound recordings to iconographic representations: films, photographs, oral histories).
- Making judgements:
The student will be able to acquire a capacity for critical interpretation of reality, suited to challenge the dominant historical narratives, which were constructed around the mechanisms of the Nation building, by increasing instead the value of social change as a core dimension around which historical analysis and diagnosis of the contemporary world should be organized.
- Communication skills:
The student will be able to get abilities and skills in order to express complex political, social and juridical situations by acquiring new communication skills.
- Learning skills:
The student will be able to acquire: knowledge of the main dynamics of social change in Italian and European society since the second post-war period; autonomous and critical understanding of the mechanisms of the mediation and re-mediation of memory through the representative forms of collective imagination, which need to be considered in an
alternative manner to the dominant national interpretations of the past.
How to link with other teachings
The connection with the teachings of the History of Europe and of the Community institutions and Theories and practices of active citizenship is recommended.
By the study of Social History the student will be able to achieve the following training objectives.
- Knowledge and understanding:
The student will be able to investigate cultures, mentalities, places, that – starting from second after war – cted as sensors / receptors of the messages that changed the system of values and needs: civil rights movements, politics of memory, school, family relationships, religious dissent, discourses on the body and sexuality, youth identity, exemplary spaces of the battle for the promotion of personal freedoms at the foundation of the citizens' statute.
- Applying knowledge and understanding:
The student will be able to to analyze, by the means of oral and audiovisual sources, the social dynamics, on the border between the public and private spheres, which led to the formation of a democratic, effective and supportive citizenship. Students are indeed actively involved in workshop-exercises based on the audiovisual repertoires (with the plurality
of mediums available, from documentaries to cinema, from sound recordings to iconographic representations: films, photographs, oral histories).
- Making judgements:
The student will be able to acquire a capacity for critical interpretation of reality, suited to challenge the dominant historical narratives, which were constructed around the mechanisms of the Nation building, by increasing instead the value of social change as a core dimension around which historical analysis and diagnosis of the contemporary world should be organized.
- Communication skills:
The student will be able to get abilities and skills in order to express complex political, social and juridical situations by acquiring new communication skills.
- Learning skills:
The student will be able to acquire: knowledge of the main dynamics of social change in Italian and European society since the second post-war period; autonomous and critical understanding of the mechanisms of the mediation and re-mediation of memory through the representative forms of collective imagination, which need to be considered in an
alternative manner to the dominant national interpretations of the past.
How to link with other teachings
The connection with the teachings of the History of Europe and of the Community institutions and Theories and practices of active citizenship is recommended.
teacher profile teaching materials
Course objective is to go over this historical period to investigate cultures, mentalities, places, that acted as sensors / receptors of the messages that changed the system of values and needs: civil rights movements, politics of memory, school, family relationships, religious dissent, discourses on the body and sexuality, youth identity, exemplary spaces of the battle for the promotion of personal freedoms at the foundation of the citizens' statute (e.g. the material and symbolic peripheries, i.e. the slums of the urban landscape in Western Europe as well as the newly built areas of Eastern European metropolis, up to the existential peripheries of social marginality: class, "race", gender).
The course also focuses on the decisive action of the unions. The unions have been a central social mediation actor in those conflicting and disaggregated realities where the economic crisis was acting as a multiplier of ethnic and identity tensions. This is the case of the multi-ethnic suburbs where a fragile social texture is characterized by a poor working population, affected by the failure of previous industrial and housing policies and by the growth of youth unemployment. There the traditional social conflicts are accompanied by the hardships of migrant workers groups, whose personal situations are often painfully linked to the refugee condition and to political exile trajectories. In this framework, the unions operate as violence prevention device, and as an aid to a better mutual understanding and multicultural integration.
Students are actively involved in workshop-exercises based on the audiovisual repertoires (with the plurality of mediums available, from documentaries to cinema, from sound recordings to iconographic representations: films, photographs, oral histories). This workshop plays a central role in developing the course.
The workshop exercise is focused on some keywords and on the “route” of these keywords, i.e. in which way and to what extent they became reality in European societies.
Key words for macro-themes concerning the modernization of a democratic society are:
- Women (feminism)
- Social and political rights: work, school, family law, housing
- Rights and diversity
- Youth culture
- Welfare
- Ecology
- Militancy
- Violence
- Centrality of workers (factory)
- Anti-fascism
- Memory
Guido Crainz, Il paese mancato: dal miracolo economico agli anni Ottanta, Donzelli Editore, 2003
For non-attending students
Tony Judt, Postwar: La nostra storia 1945-2005, Laterza 2017
Guido Crainz, Il paese mancato: dal miracolo economico agli anni Ottanta, Donzelli Editore, 2003
Programme
The teaching of Social history takes into account the transformations of Italian and European society since the end of the Second World War until the present day. This time span has been for Europe an extraordinary time that recorded in the different national contexts, the achievement of greater formal and substantive democracy, the expansion of the sphere of individual rights, the use of creative forms of self-representation (music, art, cinema) as social action languages and tools, alternative options to violence and authoritarianism.Course objective is to go over this historical period to investigate cultures, mentalities, places, that acted as sensors / receptors of the messages that changed the system of values and needs: civil rights movements, politics of memory, school, family relationships, religious dissent, discourses on the body and sexuality, youth identity, exemplary spaces of the battle for the promotion of personal freedoms at the foundation of the citizens' statute (e.g. the material and symbolic peripheries, i.e. the slums of the urban landscape in Western Europe as well as the newly built areas of Eastern European metropolis, up to the existential peripheries of social marginality: class, "race", gender).
The course also focuses on the decisive action of the unions. The unions have been a central social mediation actor in those conflicting and disaggregated realities where the economic crisis was acting as a multiplier of ethnic and identity tensions. This is the case of the multi-ethnic suburbs where a fragile social texture is characterized by a poor working population, affected by the failure of previous industrial and housing policies and by the growth of youth unemployment. There the traditional social conflicts are accompanied by the hardships of migrant workers groups, whose personal situations are often painfully linked to the refugee condition and to political exile trajectories. In this framework, the unions operate as violence prevention device, and as an aid to a better mutual understanding and multicultural integration.
Students are actively involved in workshop-exercises based on the audiovisual repertoires (with the plurality of mediums available, from documentaries to cinema, from sound recordings to iconographic representations: films, photographs, oral histories). This workshop plays a central role in developing the course.
The workshop exercise is focused on some keywords and on the “route” of these keywords, i.e. in which way and to what extent they became reality in European societies.
Key words for macro-themes concerning the modernization of a democratic society are:
- Women (feminism)
- Social and political rights: work, school, family law, housing
- Rights and diversity
- Youth culture
- Welfare
- Ecology
- Militancy
- Violence
- Centrality of workers (factory)
- Anti-fascism
- Memory
Core Documentation
For attending studentsGuido Crainz, Il paese mancato: dal miracolo economico agli anni Ottanta, Donzelli Editore, 2003
For non-attending students
Tony Judt, Postwar: La nostra storia 1945-2005, Laterza 2017
Guido Crainz, Il paese mancato: dal miracolo economico agli anni Ottanta, Donzelli Editore, 2003
Type of delivery of the course
Classroom lessons and workshop exercises. The exercises are an integral part of the evaluation in progress for the purpose of passing the exam.Type of evaluation
The assessment method consists of a written test: For attending students, in a report on the topics developed during the workshop exercises, aimed at demonstrating the acquisition of a deep cognitive and conceptual framework; For non-attending students, in a task with 4 open-ended questions, designed to demonstrate full knowledge of the reference texts.