PRIN 2020

P.I. (local unit): Marina Bondi

Italian partners: University of Pisa (coordination), University of Verona, University of Rome La Sapienza, University of Cagliari. 

2022-

In corporate and institutional settings, transparency refers to the degree of openness in disclosing information to key stakeholders as well as the public at large. Communicating an image of transparency remains a critical objective, particularly in light of recurring scandals and growing scrutiny on the part of informed citizens. Towards this end, corporate and institutional actors are called upon to produce communications that disclose information in a way that is perceived as transparent and trustworthy.

The global reach of modern corporations and institutions has resulted in the widespread adoption of English as the language of disclosure, representing a shared code capable of surmounting language barriers, irrespective of country of origin. Therefore, the aim of this project is to investigate how transparency is reflected in the disclosure practices of corporations and institutions operating in international/intercultural contexts and thus using English to achieve this purpose. The focus will be on discourse used in particular sectors of operation and communicative events in which public perceptions of transparency need to be carefully cultivated and maintained, including health, energy, transportation, the environment, and the fashion industry. The research units will compile and analyze a series of modular corpora comprising written and oral disclosure genres in order to shed light on how transparency is manifested, enhanced, or hindered. Particular attention will be paid to disclosure genres that are emerging or evolving thanks to innovative digital affordances. The shared methodological approaches and analytical frameworks among the research units encompass genre analysis, corpus-assisted discourse analysis, pragmalinguistics, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, and intercultural communication. Analyses will address particular features that may be leveraged to encode meanings related to transparency, including structural and rhetorical patterns in texts; intertextuality and interdiscursivity, distinctive lexico-grammatical and pragmatic devices; multimodal resources; and elements associated with intercultural communication.

The expected outcomes of the project are: 1) a heightened understanding of transparency as a communicative construct, 2) an in-depth and critical analysis of the linguistic/extralinguistic realization of transparency in the communications of globally relevant corporations and institutions, 3) the identification of new trends in disclosure practices, 4) the development of corpus resources for ongoing investigations of transparency, 5) research-informed applications that assist English language learners in acquiring communicative skills related to disclosure and transparency, and 6) guidelines and recommendations for professionals involved in the production of texts aiming to promote transparency.

PRIN 2022

P.I. Matteo Al-kalak

Partner: University of Teramo

Call for papers - deadline for proposal submission november 30, 2024

PRIN 2022

P.I. Piera Margutti

Partners: University of Bologna; University of Bolzano, University of Roma Tre.

Grounded on qualitative approaches, conversation analysis primarily, the project investigates 8 to 9-year-old children’s pragmatic and interactional competence in Italian through the observation of their forms of participation and the resources used in two settings: whole-class and small group. Using video-recordings of authentic interactions in classes in 4 Italian provinces (Modena, Bologna, Roma and Bolzano), the project has the objective of identifying the children’s participation forms in the two settings, to provide a grid of linguistic and multimodal indicators of children’s pragmatic and interactional competence, and to identify communicative strategies used by children with migratory background, when present. Findings will add knowledge to the state of the art in the field.  Practical implications might concern the development of tools for teachers’ training, such as video-based corpora, that will implement more student-centered and evidence-based educational approaches.

Digital Bandello (DiBa): Scholarly Edition and Commentaries/Bandello digitale: edizione digitale commentata delle Novelle

PRIN 2022

P.I. Elisabetta Menetti

Comitato Scientifico: Elisabetta Menetti, Patrizia Pellizzari, Carlo Baja Guarienti, Antonio Perrone, Enrico Ricceri.

The principal objective of the project is the preparation of a comprehensive digital edition of the 214 novellas by one of the most significant Italian writers of the Renaissance: Matteo Bandello (Castelnuovo Scrivia 1484/5 - Agen 1561). The PRIN 22 represents a significant step in the digital transition of Italian literary works, which serve to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of a pivotal period in the Italian and European literary tradition. 

The institutions involved in the digital edition of DiBa are the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and the University of Turin in collaboration with the Interdepartmental Research Centre on Digital Humanities DHMoRe, Hyperborea and Franco Cosimo Panini Editore.

The new digital edition will provide scholars with access to a comprehensive edition with updated annotations (historical and exegetical), philological apparatuses (census of printed editions), and exegetical apparatuses (biographical census of historical figures and dedicatees, census of the theoretical dating of the dedicatory letters and census of places).

The new complete annotated edition in an 'open access' digital format is of significant consequence for the advancement of studies on Italian narrative within the European and international scientific community, as it will provide scholars with a revised and corrected text of the first printed editions and a comprehensive and updated commentary.

Email contact: digital.bandello@gmail.com

PRIN 2022

Unit PI: Maria Chiara Rioli

Team member: Maria Antonia Paiano

Nationalisms and populisms represent some of the most relevant political and social phenomena that traverse contemporary society on a global scale. Despite an extensive historiography on these topics, the interconnections with religious factors in a comparative and transnational scale remain less explored, especially in the crucial period of the Second World War and its aftermath.

The CATO-POPULISMOS project aims at mobilizing the new Pius XII archives released in March 2020 concerning the Pacelli pontificate (1939-1958), analysing the elaborations and circulation of ideas and thoughts elaborated by Catholics on nationalisms and populisms, as they have taken shape in the perceptions of local churches and Vatican diplomacy, within the European and Latin American contexts.

More specifically, it intends to deepen the intertwining of populisms, nationalisms and Catholicism in Salazarism, Varguism, Francoism and Peronism on an ideological, cultural, pastoral and political level. The CATO-POPULISMOS project therefore proposes to unpack the Holy See's perception of Latin American and European entanglements concerning the role of the Catholic Church toward nationalisms and populisms. Moreover, it focuses on the terms and the re-semantization of the devotional practices present in the four contexts, both those that were encouraged by the Holy See (Marian devotions, Eucharistic worship, the social kingship of Christ), and those originated at a local level, linked to specific national cults, as well as antisemitic stances in the Catholic liturgy.

CATO-POPULISM applies the most recent strands of connected, relational and global history, cultural history and history of cults and religious devotions, but also public digital history, to provide an interdisciplinary and innovative methodology to the analysis of archival sources and to the dissemination of its results, through publications, a physical and digital exhibition and a Mooc course aiming at addressing scholars, but also students, citizens and the wider public.

Doing this, the CATO-POPULISMOS project contributes to the new interpretative framework initiated by studies on the relations between the nation, nationalism, the Catholic Church and Catholicism, and by the literature that has approached and unpacked the political implications of cults and devotions from within the Church itself.

PRIN 2022

Unit PI: Lorenzo Bertucelli

P.I. Collaborator: Maria Chiara Rioli

This research project looks at the social history of the Italian community in Egypt from 1864 to 1937 by deploying a distinctive micro-historical and subalternist approach. It complicates long time dominant modernist and elitist historiographical approaches focusing on communitarian elites as the only agents of meaningful historical change in the context of late XIX and early XX century Egyptian cosmopolitanism by looking at intra-communitarian and inter-communitarian social relations in a more horizontal, and less apologetic, way. It explores the agency of subaltern Italians, constituting by far the bulk of their community, to understand how they made sense of the multiple juridical and normative categories defining their racialized, classed, and gendered subjectivities within the Egyptian imperial cosmopolitan order, how they navigated these competing legal landscapes and how they appropriated and used their nationality as a positional good under the Capitulations, especially in relation to the other local and foreign communities living in the country. Such micro-historical exploration will be premised on the retrieval and proposed enhancement of a very specific set of sources which are not easily accessible to researchers at present: the civil and penal cases of the Italian Consular Courts of Cairo and Alexandria held by the Archivio Storico Diplomatico of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (hence ASDMAE) in Rome. The broader scientific objectives of the project are twofold: on one level, intervening in a rich theoretical conversation about the shifting meaning and practices of cosmopolitanism in general and the notion of  “vernacular cosmopolitanism” in particular, by exploring a historically situated case study (Egyptian colonial cosmopolitanism under Capitulary jurisdiction). On another level, writing a subaltern history of the Italian Community of Egypt. The specific archival and technological objectives of the project will be constituted by the preparation of an inventory, a multilingual catalog and a digital platform of documents in order to make the collection research-friendly and disseminate the knowledge of its historical relevance well beyond the research community. A main feature of the project is the emphasis on how widely shared historical knowledge should be regarded as a common good and an instrument of civic advancement. The historical knowledge the project seeks to produce and disseminate could impact meaningfully both public opinion and more restricted circles of policy makers and professionals. It can help decouple the contemporary association between migration and emergency by looking at trans-mediterranean human circulation and its changing directionality as a historically rooted phenomenon. But this research project may also help policy makers in rethinking the notion of the Mediterranean vocation of Italian foreign policy through a long-durée perspective.

AFAM-PNNR - Next Generation EU Program - 2024-2026

P.I. Angela Albanese
Participants: Marina Bondi, Vincenzo Gannuscio, Elisabetta Menetti

Participating members of the Partnership: Conservatory of Music of Modena and Carpi (leader), Conservatories of Music of Reggio Emilia, Gallarate, Frosinone, Pescara, Potenza, IUL University of Florence, Academy of Fine Arts of Frosinone.

By adopting a fresh approach to Opera, the project aims to enhance public appreciation of Italian cultural, artistic, and musical heritage, boosting its appeal and international recognition. This performative music production serves as a quintessential representation of Italy's national culture and artistic and musical heritage. The project also highlights International Lifelong Learning and Performance for professional development and community education. Its model is Community Opera, an innovative approach originated in the UK (1970) and developed in many Countries around the World. It is a different way of understanding Operetic production in a perspective of inclusive co-construction, cultural growth and social change. Nowadays, Opera is not for All: it is considered an outdated repertoire, for the elite alone, far removed from the artistic-musical experiences involving young people, too expensive and difficult to understand.

The “ POLIMNIA. Opera for All!” project aims to:

- Highlight the different aspects of analysis and knowledge of Opera;

- Offer innovative “facilitating” tools to develop the awareness of the public through “doing” and “co-constructing”, becoming themselves “actors and protagonists” of the Operetic experience.

- Co-construct an Opera with the local community, involving different professional skills, resources and specificities of the local area (re-using repertoires, places, spaces and infrastructures not currently in use for these purposes);

- Create a Community Opera Italian Model (C. O. I. M) based on the international model of Community Opera, focusing on the extraordinary fusion of artistic expression and community engagement, developing cultural exchange, social cohesion, and artistic growth in national and international contexts.

- Highlight new aspects of Opera (repertoire, interpreting, arranging, rewriting, transcribing, analysing the linguistic and textual process of artistic-musical products).

- Reading Opera as a product of contemporary life.

The Department will primarily centre its efforts on conducting a comprehensive analysis of the textual components within the musical compositions targeted by the project " POLIMNIA. Opera for All!”. The textual analysis will be interwoven with an diachronic examination of the literary, linguistic, historical, musical, and scenic context that influenced the creation and performance of these works. The results of the study will be published in a volume, a useful resource for disseminating research results and sharing the knowledge of lesser-known texts and musical scores with the national and international scientific community. This publication will allow the cultural, artistic and musical heritage to be valorised, promoted and made accessible to a wide audience. An International Summer School entitled “WISD- Word, Image, Scene and Digital transformations” will be also organised. Academic scholars, artists and specialists in the fields of musicology and new music languages, vocal and sound research, performing arts, literature, will guide the participants through the textual analysis and its possible impact on staging. The aim of the summer school is to go beyond theoretical approaches and emphasize practical applications.

PRIN 2017 - (Prot. 2015TJ8ZAS)

P.I. Marina Bondi

Partners: University of Bergamo, IULM Milan, University of Rome 'La Sapienza', University of Pisa

2017-2020

 Knowledge dissemination (KD) is central to innovation in research and institutional change. The growth of specialization has created the need to make knowledge accessible to non-experts (or experts in other fields), adopting communicative tools that can reach an ever growing, but not always indefinite, globalized audience. Unsurprisingly, the increasing importance of KD has led to the emergence of a wide range of genres – from newspaper or journal articles to more recent web-mediated genres, which cater to different needs.

The project aims to investigate the practices and strategies of dissemination to various audiences in a range of different settings. Special attention will be paid to how specific genres have developed over time and how they have been tailored to the addressees’ needs. The focus is on different communicative environments: the press first and the world wide web nowadays, with its growing level of participation and interaction.

The study is based on comparable corpora and electronic collections of texts, which will show how domain-specific knowledge is mediated in specialized and popularizing discourse to address different stakeholders. The method employed will combine genre and discourse analysis with corpus linguistics, focusing on:

a)  the process of KD, tracing the emergence of new genres in a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Among the genres investigated are, e.g., newspapers, scientific and popular magazines from the 16th to the early 20th century, and modern-day journalism and web genres, with their intercultural and multimodal challenges. It will thus be possible to historically contextualize the discursive processes deployed across time;

b) KD strategies across disciplines and communicative genres, focusing in particular on lexical and phraseological choices, textual processes, rhetorical structures and the communicative strategies adopted: use of metadiscourse, definitions, repetitions, reformulations, analogies and metaphors; reader/listener engagement, simplification and explicitation strategies; multimodality;

c) the degree of accuracy, alteration and bias of disseminated knowledge, in particular of sensitive topics, resulting from the transfer of specialised notions to targeted audiences, and especially to the lay public;

d) features of KD in the context of highly asymmetrical communication, with special attention to KD intended for children or intercultural audiences, and the intercultural and interdiscursive aspects involved.

Expected results include:

• a clearer definition of the nature of KD discourse
• a detailed and critical analysis of KD strategies in a synchronic and diachronic perspective
• an updated outline of the most representative genres in academic and institutional contexts (electronic and traditional)
• the provision of guidelines for communicative strategies based on instances of best practice.

PRIN 2019

P.I. Claudio Baraldi

Participants: Laura Gavioli, Vittorio Iervese, Elena Chioato (contracted), Federica Ceccoli (contracted)

National partners: University of Florence, University of Eastern Piedmont, University of Turin

Local partner (research agreement): AUSL - Reggio Emilia

Other local partners: Cooperativa Dimora d'Abramo (Reggio Emilia); Cooperativa Mediando (Modena); Cooperativa Gulliver (Modena); Centro Documentazione Donna (Modena); CEIS Onlus (Modena).

The two objectives of this project are: (1) to analyse conditions and constraints of migrant children’s participation and identity construction in education and healthcare systems; (2) to promote the implementation of a system of facilitation and mediation of their participation and identity construction.

The general category of “migrant children” includes (1) first and second generation long-term residents, (2) newcomers (refugees; children recently arrived through family reunification), (3) unaccompanied children (long-term residents or newcomers).

The basic concepts guiding the project are: intersectionality, agency and hybrid identity. Intersectionality means that migrant children’s life is influenced by the interaction of several factors (cultural diversity, gender, class, geography, age, ability, status), shaped in social systems such as education and healthcare, which differentiate their rights and opportunities. Agency means that migrant children’s active participation shows their availability to choose and contribute to shaping their social context.  Migrant children are gendered agents: they can negotiate a gendered order in social relations, although under the influence of gendered social structures. Identity is the contingent product of social negotiation, as loose manifestation of hybrid identities, based on the children’s exercise of agency.

In education and healthcare systems, children’s agency is constrained by a hierarchical order of intersecting relations. In education, children are considered incompetent in creating knowledge and this consideration is strengthened in the case of migrant children, for their difficulties in using language and in socialisation. The mainstream discourse and pattern of interaction lead to migrant children’s adaptation to the school context, rather than enhancing their agency. Research in healthcare services shows that parents’ initiatives prevail over children’s participation, the perception of children’s ethnic identity can create difficulties of participation, negotiation with doctors and parents is important to enhance children’s agency.

The project will improve knowledge of the ways of dealing with migrant children’s participation and identity in schools and healthcare services, analysing: experiences, practices and policies; involvement of children, professionals, parents (and guardians); types of expectations and levels of (dis)trust; possible forms of discrimination and marginalisation; specific activities aiming to support migrant children’s inclusion; gender differences, crossing all these aspects. Through this analysis, the project will advance the knowledge of the processes which can hinder or enhance migrant children’s agency and negotiation of their hybrid identity in healthcare and scholastic contexts, focusing on (1) forms and problems of collaboration between schools and healthcare services; (2) ways of facilitating classroom and medical communication: (3) ways of providing language and intercultural mediation. The project will thus enhance and systematise new knowledge about methods of communication, negotiation of roles and possible actions which are centred on the production of migrant children’s knowledge and wellbeing. The analysis will show if or under what conditions, education and healthcare systems can implement policies and interventions that enhance the positive value of migrant children’s agency, personal expressions and production of hybrid identities.

The project will pursue these objectives through 5 actions (A1-5). A1: background research on migrant children’s condition in healthcare and education the analysis of existing data and the analysis of best practices at a national level and in the areas of Alessandria, Firenze, Modena, Reggio Emilia, Torino, Udine. A2: quantitative analysis of migrant children’s social and cultural conditions in the mentioned areas. A3: qualitative analysis of the perspectives of children, their parents (o guardians) and professionals working with them, in schools and hospitals in the areas of Alessandria, Firenze, Torino, Udine (and Rome, only for hospital), aiming to understand children’s participation and forms of collaborations between education and healthcare in enhancing their wellbeing. A4: evaluative analysis of practices of facilitation and mediation in schools and healthcare services in Firenze, Modena and Reggio Emilia. A1-4 will produce a huge amount of quantitative and qualitative data, which can enhance A5, regarding innovation. A5: a collection of research-based materials will be used to produce guidelines for effective interventions, to plan professionals’ training, and to provide tools for self-valuation of their activities. Materials and tools will be disseminated through digital devices and archives. A1-5 will incorporate the perspective on gender in research design, sampling, data collection, data analysis, and planning of innovative actions.

PRIN 2017 (2019-2023)

P.I. Matteo Al Kalak

Partners: University of Parma (coordination), University of Padua, Ca' Foscari University - Venice