The "History of Racism and Discrimination" laboratory provides worthwhile skills for the start and implementation of educational interventions aimed at deconstructing stereotypes and prejudices and promoting dialogue and knowledge between subjects of different national and cultural origin on a reciprocal and equal foot.
The laboratory especially aims to investigate the legacy of racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, colonial and imperialist discriminatory policies that have been part of the history of all western countries. Particular attention has paid to: 1) the techniques of manipulation of consent, the propaganda invention and the subsequent ethnicization of a "public enemy"; 2) the shaping of civil rights movements for the promotion of anti-discrimination and social inclusion policies.
Knowledge and understanding:
The student will be able to investigate cultures, mentalities, places, which have forged the anthropometric and behavioral stereotypes that made a decisive contribution to the legitimization of racist and discriminatory policies as well as to deepen the paths of promotion of civil rights, related to the formation of new collective identities, such as youth protest movements, post-World War II cultural and social transformations, the phenomena of decolonization and the advent of intercultural society.

Applying knowledge and understanding:
The student will be able 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 overcoming of racist and discriminatory policies and to the shaping 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 and social situations by acquiring new communication skills.

Learning skills:
The student will be able to acquire: knowledge of the main dynamics of social change in western 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.