RICERCA ITALIANA     

Political communication and history

Università degli Studi di Teramo

Abstract

History, understood as that discursive field which uses the past for social conservation and/or redesign of the constituent order, is an essential characteristic of European and western society. This, to use Claude Lévi Strauss' expression, is precisely what makes it a "hot" society. In the last twenty years a series of changes in the conception of history and historiographic practice have made it possible to tackle this connection between a discourse on the past and its political use in a different way, often far from the traditional doxa. Thanks to these developments it is now possible to dwell on the theme of the uses of history in political communication, in a notably different way from the one traditionally understood. Not only the historiographic tradition in the proper sense, not only the wider occasional literature but also the images and the forms of ceremony, and above all the symbols re-enter this view. If, for contemporary history, an important dimension in which the new approach has been concretised is that of the "sites of memory" (P. Nora), the history of the modern era constitutes an extremely fertile terrain on which to apply the theme. It is precisely in the investigation of the ancien régime that one can see, earlier and more consistently than anywhere else, the beginning of that intolerance of modernising anachronisms which then made up the dominant methodology mark of new political history.
The project intends to focus some aspects of the >>>

Principal Investigator

Francesco BENIGNO Università degli Studi di TERAMO

Research Objectives

The research program aims to reach related objectives.
a) historiographically speaking, the researchs will bring original contributions (monographs, collective volumes and essays), in order to communicate and let the works be usable as well as they have the aim to affect in a significant way on the actual international discussions, giving contribution to the redefinition and to the innovation of the historiographic orientation on the subjects.
b) Under a methodological asset, the will to study and analyze interdisciplinary questions and problems needs a cute consideration on the best and more innovative paths for the traitment (both at theoretical and technical levels) of the different and imprescindible sources, written and iconographics ones. Infact, it is intended to proceed to the inventory, digitalization and publishing of documentary sources, iconograph materials and texts, printed and handwritten, of particular relevance.
c) As far as the scientific comparison and divulgation of results are concerned, thematic seminars and international conferences will be organized from each single Unit side. In particular, at the end of each research program, the central Unit will provide an international conference in order to introduce and to discuss the work made and the reached objectives both from the critical-methodological point of view, and from the knowledge progress, so that to put them under the international and national scientific community sifting >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

History, understood as that discursive field which uses the past for social conservation and/or redesign of the constituent order, is an essential characteristic of European and western society. This, to use Claude Lévi Strauss' expression, is precisely what makes it a "hot" society. In the last twenty years a series of changes in the conception of history and historiographic practice have made it possible to tackle this connection between a discourse on the past and its political use in a different way, often far from the traditional doxa.
The first great transformation arises from a growing awareness of the discipline of history's specific way of being a science. After a long period of attraction to the so-called "exact" sciences, and to the possibility of finding basic coherences (which can in some ways be assimilated to natural laws) in the social universe, a different attitude has appeared and become increasingly influential. This attitude takes the contingent character of social reality as a reference point – even saving the scientific dimension of history on the methodological and, it goes without saying, deontological levels. In other words, this is the same way out of scientific paradigms (be they positivist or functionalist or structuralist) which have run through other "humanistic" scientific disciplines such as sociology or anthropology since the 1980s. A growing awareness of the essentially interpretative nature of historical discourse, thanks to >>>