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.