Research Themes

Foto di Jeff Jacobs su Pixabay

Semiotic theories of memory

Memory is a semiotic issue.It is manifested through textual forms shaped by cultural logics that bring into play such topics as translation, filtering, cancellation/erasure, that needs an incessant work of theoretical reflection and redefinition. TraMe combines a semiotic approach with different academic disciplines in order to theoretically address questions that have social and cultural repercussions, such as multiculturalism, politics of memory (and symbolic control over the past), uses/abuses and misuses of memory, conflict management and resolution.

Cultural Heritage

One key research topic of TraMe is represented by the forms of preservation, management, transmission and valorization of cultural heritage, with a specific attention to traumatic and difficult heritage. The Center adopts a semiotic angle to tackle the cultural, political and social aspects signified by monuments, memorials, museums, cities, cultural heritage. Some fields of interest are:

• Spaces, places, landscapes of memory

• Archives, practices of preservation and cancellation of memory
• Materiality of Memory
• Practices and performances of memory 

Narratives of memory and trauma

• Mass (and new) media and memory
• Arts and Memory
• Autobiographies, testimonies and other "writings of memory"
• Actors of memory: victims, perpetrators, bystanders

Memory, cognition and emotions

• relations between individual and collective memory
• processes of memory between enactivism and embodied cognition
• individual and collective emotions of memory