ATS3135 - War, media and memory: Resistance and massacre in Second World War Italy

Through seminars, workshops, fieldwork and online activities this unit will examine how conflict has been reported on, represented, remembered and memorialised and how differing media have shaped the collective remembering of particular conflict events. It will consider how forms of remembrance intersect with national/ideological imperatives articulated through censorship and propaganda policies and will examine how the remembrance of conflict has been shaped by a combination of political imperative, ideological commitment and technical possibility. The unit will have a specific focus on World War 2, the Italian Resistance, and the massacre of civilians in Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. It will consider textual and cinematic responses to these events and will make use of the physical remains of the conflict and the massacres within reach of Prato. The unit will consider how, alongside written and visual responses to these events, material forms of remembrance - monuments, memorials, museums, cemeteries - function as media and how, in the process of memorialising the dead and articulating political and national ideologies, such sites acknowledge and incorporate countervailing ideologies and the contradictory testimony of survivors. The unit will unpack, examine and critique the complex inter-relations between media, memory and war, exploring how in pursuit of specific political and cultural goals memories of conflict are created, constructed and recovered. Students will be invited to move beyond a purely theoretical understanding of these issues by visiting museums, massacre sites and their memorials, examining and critiquing their mediation and creating a critical/creative response to one such site.