Italy

The course provides students with the sociological-empirical analysis of societal phenomena, such as integration, acceleration, polarization, fragmentation and social action, such as conflict, protest, critique, social mobilization, and claims-making. It also introduces the students to a range of methodological approaches to the study of society/social actors in interaction with politics, law, and the economy. The course enhances the student's capacity and skills to analyze society, social actors, and social problems by using sociological and interdisciplinary instruments.

The course is divided into 3 parts:

In the first part, the course provides an introduction to political sociology, its main sociological theories, concepts, and forms of analysis. Political sociology will be explored through main themes including power and authority, conflict in society, forms of mobilization, societal actors and civil society, and interaction with state (and international/transnational) institutions as well as economic actors.

In the second part, the course provides a specific (and critical) attention to forms of (innovative) data gathering, measurement, ranking, the usage of big data, and the potential downsides to the collection and uses of big data. The course critically discusses formatting, codification, quantification, measurement, rankings, forms of surveillance and control, performance indicators, and auditing.

In the third part, the course explores specific case-studies around four themes: Rule of law and democracy; Human rights, crime, surveillance, and justice; Market economy, the digital world.

This course provides real world, experience-based learning on what it's like to actually start a new business. The main objective is to allow students to directly experience the earliest phases of an entrepreneurial startup process. The focus is on concept building and testing. Students are asked to actively engage in developing the initial business idea, but also in talking to potential customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors, as they confront the chaos and uncertainty of how a real startup actually emerges from the entrepreneurs' efforts.

This course is designed to be a broad introduction to the field of sociology. Students encounter some of the most influential theories developed, imagined and used by sociologists to make sense of the social world. We discuss and acquire familiarity with the concepts sociologists typically use in their work, and with some of the core methods sociologists employ to investigate the social world. For instance, students gain an understanding of what sociologists mean when they talk about culture, socialization and social structure, and how sociologists analyse these concepts linking theory and empirical analyses. The course also encourages students to think critically (i.e. as a social scientist, about human life and societies and develop their own questions about social life). Finally, the course pays particular attention to the broad themes of inequality as it pertains to race, class and gender, and the social changes it brought about, as well as family changes, by adopting a life course perspective. 

The course is divided in two parts. The first part of the course focuses on the concept of security applied to different sectors and case studies. Human security, food security, migration, health security, environmental security, and the protection of cultural heritage in conflict zones are analyzed through the prism of political theory and critical security studies, based on contemporary case studies. The main objective of this module is to enable students to develop analytical and critical skills in the field of security studies. The second part focuses on exploring key phenomena of cooperation and conflict among and within states and their determinants, such as inter and intra-state wars, terrorism, military alliances, and military coups, adopting a strictly quantitative perspective. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course is divided into three parts:

A) The first part (Sociology of Law) is delivered in person. The students survey the main classic and contemporary approaches to the sociology of law: the focus is on the classic integration theories and theories of conflict: in particular, the Durkheimian, Weberian, and Marxist approaches are analyzed.

B) In the middle part, which takes place online, the students explore topics such as: recent theories on moral reasoning, affective primacy, and confirmative thought as keys to understand the human behavior in the digital dimension; aggressivity in the online arena against the individual (e.g. cyberbullying, revenge porn) and against groups (e.g. call out culture, hate speech, and use of memes); polarization and echo chambers.

C) In the last part, which is delivered in person again, the three main conceptions developed in the philosophy of law—namely, natural law theory, legal positivism, and legal realism—are presented, emphasizing their theoretical implications; then, some contemporary trends (such as legal feminism) are introduced and discussed, also in connection with the traditional views.

At the end of the course, students: know the history of legal philosophy thanks to the development, during the course unit, of a thematic analysis centered on fundamental theoretical problems and argumentative patterns designed to resolve those issues also under a perspective approach; know the classical and contemporary theoretical-sociological debate on the function of law, the relationship between social and legal norms, the social nature of the concepts of status and role; are capable to deal with problems of theoretical and legal nature, in a logical manner and by relying on a solid argumentation, and to discuss those problems in an interactive way by efficiently communicating the advantages of multiple their multiple structures and issues.

The course provides:

• Sources, methods and tools for the study of Greek history 
• Themes and prominent figures of Greek history through the analysis of selected and translated sources pertaining to the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods (approximately 20 hours).
• Specific topic: Demetrius the Besieger and the creation of the Hellenistic state (approximately 20 hours).

The program includes the knowledge, acquired through the students' independent study, of the key events in Greek history, from its origins to the first century BC, focusing on the evidence for the reconstruction of these events. By the end of the course, students are broadly familiar with the development of Greek history, using the basic interpretive categories towards critical analysis of issues pertaining to the Greek world and working from historical and documentary sources read in the original and in translation. Students have a good knowledge of the main themes, events, and phenomena of Greek history in a broader context, possess precise spatio-temporal coordinates and know the main tools of information, research, and updating. They also read works by historians in at least one language other than Italian and are able to speak in the appropriate technical terminology.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. This course examines archaeological research on the human body and dress in ancient civilizations, in terms of clothing, ornamentation, and body modification. The course considers different approaches and sources to define the topic and explores the way and extent to which these matters contribute to our understanding of ancient societies. By integrating textual sources, iconographic documents, and archaeological evidence, the course delves into dress as a dynamic index in the construction of identity and instrumental in mediating social, political, and ritual relationships within the cultural environment. Through the study of various case studies across the Mediterranean, students acquire theoretical and practical knowledge of the discipline and are able to critically engage with the current debate in relation to wider social processes. By the end of the course students will have verified the procedures used in archaeological research, ranging over the entire process from discovery to publication; they will be au fait with the state of knowledge on field work, on responsible technical and scientific productions and on designing international research. The skills acquired equip them to tackle the requirements of research, conservation, and protection of the archaeological heritage within their own competences.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The course content includes:

1) From health-related quality of life to dimensions of psychological well-being: the conceptual framework and their process of assessment in clinical psychology.

2) The unifying concept of euthymia and its psychological evaluation.

3) The science of clinimetrics and clinimetric criteria for Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs).

4) Clinimetric approach to the definition and clinical assessment of psychological distress.

5) The experience of psychological suffering: the concept of mental pain and its clinimetric evaluation.

6) The concept of demoralization and its detection based on clinimetric criteria.

7) The Hamilton Rating Scales and the clinical assessment of depression.

8) Somatization, illness denial and the clinimetric domain of psychosomatics.

9) The clinimetric domain of clinical pharmacopsychology.

By the end of the course, students know the theoretical paradigms of mental health as a multidimensional construct and are able to use the appropriate rating scales for a comprehensive assessment of mental health according to clinimetric criteria.

The course investigates the relationship between twentieth-century political-social movements and the artistic imaginary that these contribute to create, disseminate, transform and by which they are in turn influenced. Each artistic expression (from painting to design, from theater to music, from architecture to literature) has its own specific relationship with the historical conditions in which it was born and which in turn it contributed to create. The course presents a series of specific conjunctions between artistic forms and political-social events of the last 150 years. By the end of the course, students are expected to know the history of Italian and international social movements of the last century; how to analyse the cultural and artistic forms of these movements; how to relate the political transformation to the production of the artistic imagination; and to recognize the influence of social movements on contemporary art forms.

This course explores the 19th- and 20th-century development of crime fiction, with a double focus on the subgenres of detective fiction and of the psychological thriller, which flourished in relation to the relevance psychoanalysis acquired as an interpretative paradigm of the human. Its aim is to illustrate the complexity of a genre that was reductively considered in the past as structurally formulaic and critically uninteresting, but which has recently obtained increasing attention and recognition as a significant literary phenomenon.

This cross-media genre is explored as a ‘field of tension’ in order to study the changing status of both detection/detectives (due to the development of forensic science) and of crime/criminals (due to the continuous reshaping of laws and social norms). The course investigates the interplay between aspects of the detective such as mind and body (thinking machines versus vulnerable detectives), intellect and emotions (how do these apparently opposed dimensions concur to the personality of fallible and infallible detectives?). Students also utilize the critical category of gender to investigate authorial issues and characterization.

Upon completing this course, students acquire an in-depth knowledge of the history of English literature. They obtain critical insight into a selection of literary works and can evaluate their literary qualities, analyzing them with the help of precise critical metholodogies. They acquire the theoretical tools needed to recognize the formal, thematic and stylistic components of the works included in the syllabus, relating them to their historical and cultural contexts. Students discuss, translate, and relate the contents of these works from a linguistic, historical, and philological viewpoint.