Thematic clusters

This line of enquiry deals with the mechanisms or adaptation strategies through which societies and individuals cope with the consequences of traumatic experiences. From the pioneering studies on 'war psychosis' or the 'survivor syndrome', we have now moved on to wide-ranging research on  the failure to include or erase ruined places in the material reconstruction after conflicts. In shaping an environment that no longer includes 'contaminated spaces', objective procedures of disqualification and redevelopment of the territory have thus been adopted, which have not only made it difficult to draw up a map potentially encompassing all the 'points' of massacre, but have also disoriented the feelings of belonging of veterans/survivors to the environment and its history.

"Trauma and memory" is traditionally referred to as a recent paradigm in the field of memory studies, which emerged mainly towards the end of the 20th century.  The proposal is to investigate it in a longer diachronic dimension in relation to twentieth-century studies on traumatic 'witnessing' in the psychological, legal and literary fields.

Reflection on the legacies of trauma and on the forms of 'non-hereditary memory' of a community has long shown that perception and knowledge of traumatic or catastrophic events most often occur not through direct experience, but through mediated images, objects, stories, behaviours and affects. A specific line of investigation will question performative memory in order to assess its impact in practices of reconstruction or reconciliation.

Archives are never configured neutrally and always involve the need to reflect on the models and modes of transmission of written sources. Their very arrangement reflects a diachronic stratification of different concepts of memory and concrete interests related to documentary preservation. They also reflect denied or dangerous memories, made inaccessible by formal prohibitions and secrecy. Agreements, with state archives, organizations, associations, companies with significant international experience will allow the development of innovative forms and methods to order, preserve and enhance archival heritage in a scientifically correct manner.

In recent decades, increasing attention has been drawn to the materiality of written sources themselves, an innovative and necessarily interdisciplinary field of investigation that requires critical attention and specific, renewed training. Recent investigations have indeed made it possible to attribute specific meaning to the different writing media and their availability, to the different forms of layout of the contents, to the writings on the margins and to the signs of use, with significant repercussions on the very interpretation of the testimonies and the memories built upon them. This is coupled with new technologies that enable the full recovery of lost texts, i.e. consciously discarded memories, such as palimpsests.

The digital transformation has already brought about significant changes in access to written documentation. Archives, libraries and museums are increasingly sharing parts of their patrimony online. On the one hand, this entails an information problem, which calls for reflection on the development of integrated systems for their use. On the other hand, critical consideration must be given to the impact and repercussions that such access to the written documentation has on research, because digitization inevitably imposes a selection of sources that risks creating new information hierarchies and thus a more or less unconscious selection of memory.

The museum has been and is one of the main spaces of memory in Western modernity. Collecting, preserving, ordering and exhibiting objects and artefacts has meant constructing memories and identity narratives, often based on an unbalanced and not infrequently oppositional relationship between those who collect and those who are collected, between those who narrate and those who are narrated. The critical analysis of museum collections, of their complex biographies, as well as of the taxonomies underlying them, is a necessary step to imagine museum policies capable of producing dialogic, equitable and inclusive memories.

The environments in which we move are constellated with material emergencies that constitute veritable mnemonic palimpsests. Inhabiting those spaces therefore implies interacting, more or less actively, with a plurality and stratification of forms of memorization, not infrequently perceived as dissonant with contemporary values. The analysis of the practices and policies of memorization - from the restoration and enhancement of monuments to their demolition - allows us to explore the complexity of the relationship between inhabiting and remembering.

The increasingly widespread use of material culture as a source for historical analysis is one of the repercussions of the material turn that has invested the broader field of the humanities in recent years. The status of material culture as a source, as well as a serious consideration of the materiality of written or visual sources, calls for a profound and renewed theoretical reflection as well as the elaboration of tools and methods that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries.

In times of transition, from war to peace, from authoritarian regimes to democracies, from empires to national independence, the past is the subject of a critical confrontation aimed at the reconstruction of a civilized consortium based on the search for historical truth. Memory is the source of legitimation of an order and at the same time the terrain of conflict and critical scrutiny.

Nation-building processes mobilize historical narratives aimed at providing identity foundations for supposed communities of descent. Policies of memory therefore assume a crucial political role by introducing devices of inclusion and exclusion that aim to draw the boundaries of ethnic affiliations.

Political language has often been constructed on the basis of dichotomies that have acquired changing meanings in the various historical periods (civilization and barbarism, West and East, countrymen and foreigners, civilized and savage ...). The definition of these othernesses has made use of linguistic repertoires filtered and recombined by an exercise of institutional memory that has deeply rooted certain structures of representation to the point of naturalizing them.

In its modern sense, the concept of revolution seems to imply a resolute distancing from the past and an energetic projection into the future. Yet, revolutionary political cultures tie threads of memory with the past: either by recalling events that failed to realize their demands for transformation or emancipation, or by rereading past revolutions as anticipations of the future, often producing unexpected outcomes.

This line of research will focus on the multiple ways in which critical memory studies problematizes the construction, negotiation, management and resistance to 'authorized' memories in specific locations. By observing the inherent 'dissonance' in mainstream memory discourses and literature, this strand of research acknowledges the polyvalence of memory and processes of remembering, and highlights the spatial practices related to ‘bottom-up’ memories, processes of resistance and, more broadly, the conflictual nature of memory and memory studies. This strand of research will attract scholars (a) focused on tourism and critical geographies of heritage; (b) interested in the multiple interpretations of memory spaces constructed by groups and communities situated on different scales; and (c) working on the politics and histories of vulnerable groups.

This line of research will focus on processes of memory creation in relation to migration, the right to mobility and social movements. Research in this strand will revolve around projects aimed at understanding how both migratory movements and social movements and practices of collective struggle destabilize the nation in its dimension of 'imagined community' and to what extent these give rise to the emergence of new political spaces and subjects.  The research strand will attract researchers a) investigating how migrants and migrants' movements produce collective 'bottom-up' memories, which challenge 'methodological nationalism' and b) working on the spatial histories of social movements. In particular, this will focus on the role of places and spaces in the processes of producing 'bottom-up' memories.