Italy

The course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. This course explores the connection between globalization, the evolution of criminology, and crime, and how this connection changes in space and time. Globalization affects crime phenomena in a variety of ways: creating new conditions and opportunities for new types of crime or reshaping more traditional criminal behaviors and increasing insecurity and fear of crime. Moreover, globalization requires new categories to explain and understand crime and therefore affects and reshapes many traditional criminological theories. Finally, globalization has an impact also on strategies of crime control and surveillance.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. There are two versions of this course; this course, UCEAP Course Number 188A and Bologna course number 78696, is associated with the LM in Language, Society, and Communication degree programme. The other version, UCEAP Course Number 188B and Bologna course numbers 29886 and 81714, is associated with the LM in Modern, Post-Colonial and Comparative Literatures and the LM in Geography and Territorial Processes degree programmes.
This course examines languages as cultural features linking the human communities to their territories, history, and geopolitical evolution, with a particular analysis of the changes occurred in the spatial dimension of languages, in connection to acculturation processes and to linguistic policies. In this respect, the course deals with the regional division of the European languages and with the EU language policy both in respect to minority languages and to the process of linguistic education of its citizens. The relationship between linguistic diversity and biological diversity is also explored with a geographical focus on the issue of language death. The course examines the relationship between space/place and language from different perspectives. At the beginning of the course, the students explore the field of cultural geography and its main themes, concepts, and keywords. After having explored the differences between linguistic geography and geographies of languages, the course focus on the second and using both theories and empirical cases, looks at the interconnections between culture, cultural geography, and language geography; language as cultural phenomenon; toponyms and culture; and semiotics of space. Moreover, the course observes how the relationship between geography and language expresses itself in different configurations of bodies and spaces: digital and media spaces, literary spaces, migratory fluxes, terrorism discourses and place-bound semiotics, tourism performance, and cultural and intercultural spaces.

The first objective of the course is to explore and understand the storytelling epic, the symbolic imaginaries, and the ideological architectures of media events, both planned and unplanned. The specific focus on the recent "trauma television," the coverage of dramatic moments in human and medium history will provide students a further direct-experience based occasion to develop a critical and meaning creation oriented approach towards the medium. The final goal is to let students appreciate how television works, how it’s able to take a precise picture of constitutive parameters, problematic conjunctions, practices, moods, and contradictions of society, and why it still plays such a strategic role in social, cultural, and political issues in national and international contexts. The course main subject is essentially the relation of reciprocal influence between television and society. Built on a solid critical basis, mostly linked to cultural studies, sociology and journalism theories, the course is designed under the theoretical umbrella of the most important medium scholars, from McLuhan to Beaudrillard, and from Kellner to Dayan and Katz. The course discusses topics including television communication in general, its main theories, its complex spectrum of meanings, its storytelling processes, and its numerous social implications; the media events field, with ritual planned events (typically contests, conquests, coronations) and disruptive unplanned ones (disaster, terror, and war); and the "trauma television" of the last two years that is putting unexpected events in the television central stage as never before, even in some cases questioning their very notion – specifically the pandemic, the Capitol Hill riots, the various natural disasters caused by the climate change, and the Taliban takeover of Aghanistan – ground-breaking examples of the link between medium, contemporary history and our everyday life.

The course discusses two main topics. The first topic is on Etruscans and the Italic peoples: Ancient Italy between Bronze Age and Iron Age. Topics include the transition from the protovillanovian to the villanovian period; transformations of the population, origin of the proto-urban centres and “formation” of the Etruscan ethnos; cultures, languages, and peoples of the pre-roman Italy; Etruscans and their relationships with the other italic peoples: commercial exchanges and cultural connections; and cultural and chronological periods. The second topic is on History and culture of the Etruscans Culture: The Villanovian period (IX-VIII c. BCE). Topics include from the hut to the house and from the village to the town; the early forms of social and political organization; the Orientalizing period (VIII-VII c. BCE): the rise and consolidation of the aristocracy; the culture of the princes; palaces and big funerary architecture; different expressions of the aristocratic ideology; the Archaic period (VI c. BCE): the end of the aristocracies and coming of the demos; big works of urban monumentalizing; cities and their harbors; relations with the oriental Greek Culture; the Classic period (V-IV c. BCE): the dominance of the inner Etruria and the crisis of the coastal Etruria; the artistic issue and the relationships with Greece; the Hellenistic period (IV-III c. BCE): the great “crisis” of the Fourth Century and the return of aristocracies; the relations with Macedonia and Magna Graecia and last great season of the Etruscan culture; and conflict with Rome and decline of the Etruscans.

The course has 2 parts A and B. Students must take both parts. No partial credit is possible. Students who complete a paper on a pre-approved topic are awarder1 extra quarter unit per part. Maxim units for this course are 12, 6 for each part. The course focuses on the history of photography from its origins to the present with particular attention to technical and aesthetic developments. Special attention is placed on the role of photography in 20th century art and the application of photography in cultural industries such as fashion, publicity, and media. A section of the course is dedicated to contemporary artistic research and its applications in the field of communication. Part A of the course focuses on photography and art and the topics include the relationship between photography and art, definition/s of artistry in the 20th century, the role of the author and the production of the work of art, the contribution of technology in contemporary art, and contaminations between visual arts and other disciplines. Part B of the course focuses on photography and reality and discusses topics including the role of photography in 19th and 20th century art, the relationship with reality, the role of technology, painting and “ready-made” art, and the work of art and behavior.

This course is an upper-division introduction to linguistics, the scientific study of human language, and to what characterizes human language and makes it different from other animal communication systems and other human cognitive systems. The course introduces the different components that human language is made of and how linguists investigate them. In particular, it looks at sounds (and signs) and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to words (phonetics, phonology, and morphology); it looks at words and how they can be combined to form bigger units up to sentences (syntax); finally, it looks at how words and sentences can be used to convey meaning (semantics and pragmatics). While doing so, it emphasizes the innate cognitive aspects of human language but also touches on those aspects that are sensitive to culture and society and determine some of the variation and differences among human languages. Some of the question the course addresses include: what is a language and what does knowledge of a language consist of; are human languages fundamentally different from other systems of animal communication; are some languages better than others; what's a dialect and how does it compare to a language; how do children acquire language, does our knowledge of language derive entirely from experience, or do humans come “hardwired” with certain innate capacities for language; how do languages develop and change over time? For practical reasons, English is the primary source of data and examples for the course for practical reasons as the lingua franca. Still, data from other languages are presented throughout the course, with special attention to Italian, other languages (aka "dialects") spoken in Italy, and languages spoken by the students in the course.

Slow Food is a movement whose philosophy is defined by three interconnected principles: good, clean, fair - where “slower/better” is promoted over “faster/cheaper.” This course examines how Slow Food started initially as a protest against McDonalds opening in Rome to igniting a global revolution in such diverse sectors as tourism, education, and city planning. The course studies how Slow Food governance advocates ecological and political awareness, equitable food policy, and sustainable practices that are not only good for the planet, but as the commercial success of Eataly has demonstrated, business as well. Through case studies such as Eataly, but also visits to local farms and interviews with local producers and distributers, the course examines how Slow Food philosophy intersects with business practices. This course aims to assess what happens when the tenets of sustainability, responsibility, and sharing are combined with the value proposition to provide a unique cultural experience that exports the Italian way of life on a global scale. What is the bottom line: has tradition met innovation, or exploitation? 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program in cultural anthropology. The course is intended for advanced levels students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on Algorithmic Patriarchy? Feminist critiques of technosocietal relations

The course is a component of the integrated course (IC) in "Political Theory". Combining a close reading of some of the most recent contributions of feminist political theory to the understanding and critique of the “politics of the algorithm” with the reading and comment of some classic texts of women's political thought in the second half of the twentieth century, the course investigates how the algorithm redefines some key political concepts in the field of tension between masculine domination and women's freedom. Using conceptual history, and providing a political understanding of the technical dimension of algorithmic operations (such as search of keywords on internet, facial recognition, datamining) the course provides students with the tools necessary to highlight the continuities and discontinuities that the algorithm determines in patriarchal social relations and liberation practices starting from the reflection around some key-concepts for feminist political theory: nature (sex / gender, domination / power); identity (codification / politicization); recognition (discrimination / struggle); difference (universal / particular).

At the end of the course students will acquire a knowledge of the ways in which women had historically criticized the theoretical justification of their subordination articulated in Western political and social thought. By applying the fundamental tools of feminist and post-colonial theories, the course will provide an historical analysis of political and social concepts – such as authority, freedom, rights, citizenship, society, labor – as the expression of gendered relations of power.