P.I. Donatella Malavasi
2022-2024
The project aims to analyse the manifestation of transparency in the disclosure practices of national and international corporations operating in the transportation sector. The economic crisis triggered by the recent Covid-19 pandemic and increasing calls for sustainable development have affected several sectors, amongst which transportation. Trains, airlines, cruise ships, and coaches, are now facing the challenge of developing new communication strategies to address the issues of safety and environmental sustainability to (re)build public trust and confidence. The study will be carried out from the theoretical, descriptive, and applied perspectives. On the theoretical level, transparency will be examined as a composite construct that is dynamically constituted in discourse and multimodality. The analysis will focus on transparency as a trait or indicator of corporate reputation and on its interconnectedness with credibility, trust, and Corporate Social Responsibility. On the descriptive level, the project will explore how and to what extent transparency emerges in the English-language disclosures of a selection of corporations which operate in the transportation sector and whose activities have implications for stakeholders on a global level. The research will analyse written forms of corporate communication in an attempt to shed light on how transparency is constructed, enhanced or hindered. Special attention will be paid to the construction of transparency in the discussion of issues relevant to the sector, namely safety and environmental impact. A combination of well-consolidated quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks will be adopted to investigate transparency in corporate and CSR communication. The language-oriented approach will include genre analysis, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and multimodality. The study will address strategies adopted by companies for transparency vs. opacity purposes, including structural and rhetorical patterns in texts; lexico-grammatical devices as well as multimodal resources. Additional insights will come by drawing on behavioural economics, according to which individual choices are affected by how information is presented. On the applied level, the results expected from this project will be translated into practical applications to the benefit of the international academic community and of professionals of communication who are engaged in preparing disclosures in which transparency is a key concern. The expected outcomes of the project are: 1) a better understanding of transparency as a composite construct, 2) an in-depth analysis of the strategies adopted by companies to increase or hinder transparency in their communications, 3) the creation of sample teaching/learning resources that assist English language learners in acquiring communicative skills related to transparency, 4) recommendations and guidelines for best transparency practices addressing enterprises as well as professionals who are engaged in disseminating corporate and CSR information.
FAR FOMO 2022
PI: Maria Chiara Rioli
Team members: Claudio Baraldi, Angela Albanese, Giacomo Guaraldi
Disability is a complex notion: historically, it has encompassed multiple and sometimes opposing meanings, conditions and representations. In modern and contemporary times, it intertwines with notions of normalcy, health, pathology, race, victimhood, social dis/order, as unpacked in recent decades by the history of disability. Despite this vibrant research field, the history of migrants and refugees with disability remains largely unexplored: women, men, children with disabilities who cross countries and continents, rejected according to immigration laws that discriminate on the basis of mental and physical illness, hidden by their own families in the transit and host societies, targets of special programs by humanitarian agencies, but also protagonists of movements for civil, political and social rights.
DHABILITY seeks to achieve identification and knowledge of the archival history of migrants and refugees with different forms of disability from the 1970s to today. DHABILITY also investigates the definition of the concept of disability, retracing linguistic, cultural and political transformations and perceptions. Moreover, DHABILITY intends to identify and promote new forms of public digital history about disability and migration, connecting scholars, practitioners and the wider audience.
The DHABILITY project intends to implement a broad range of research, analysis, dissemination and communication initiatives, through the involvement of University centres and laboratories with extensive experience on these issues: two Horizon2020 collaborative projects led by UNIMORE, the Interdepartmental Research Centre on Digital Humanities, the History of Migration Laboratory, the UNIMORE Office for Students with Disability and Students with Specific Learning Disabilities (DSA), associations and entreprises for diversity and inclusion in the job market of migrants with disability and other institutions. It also includes the close synergy with a solid network of stakeholders that includes the Municipality of Modena, numerous associations and educational institutions in the area, in order to produce a lasting impact in the scientific, social and political spheres. In doing so, it aims to influence the historiography and the public discourse on both disability and migration, paving the path to a new field: the history of disability in migration and refugeedom.
P.I. Alessandra Gribaldo
November 2023 - April 2025
Team members: Selenia Marabello, Vittorio Iervese, Lorenzo Bertucelli, Martina Magri.
Home movies represent special documents as repositories of memories and intimate perspectives, archives of stories and history. Dense with references to social contexts, this amateur cinema is a goldmine of aesthetic and visual codes. Despite their fascination, these documents have long been considered unimportant for scholarly research as they are deemed vernacular, marginal, unprofessional, and unreliable. Nevertheless, several projects have sprung up in recent years aimed at collecting, digitizing, archiving, analysing, and enhancing the various family film collections that exist in a given territory. So far, the Municipality and Province of Modena have not been involved in this kind of research, which is gaining particular attention nationally and internationally.
The research "80mm" project aims to deal with family films - in particular those made between 1920 and 2000- which are to be found in private and domestic audiovisual archives in the Modena area ("80mm" refers to an imaginative film format or photographic lens, but also an acronym for 80 years of Modena Movies). The project will have the unique advantage of the technical collaboration with Home Movies (https://homemovies.it/), an Italian foundation and national archive of family films, and the Memoryscape platform (https://www.memoryscapes.it/it/), which makes collected and digitized home movies available publicly.The research project "80mm" will pay attention to audiovisual materials from the city and province of Modena to implement the first reasoned archive of this territory.
The research team is composed in such a way as to cover the different skills required for the analysis and processing of the audiovisual material. In particular on: kinship, gender and representations of intimacy from an anthropological perspective (Gribaldo); the analysis of social interactions, documentary cinema and visual studies (Iervese); the anthropological analysis of domestic space and objects as well as internal and international mobility to Modena (Marabello), the narrative re-use of archival material (Magri) and the more specifically historical dimension relating to memory and the territory of Modena and its surroundings (Bertucelli).
P.I. Michele Lodone
2023-
In 1466, a lively debate was opened in Rome on the role of Christian poverty, in which prominent humanists and men of the curia close to Pope Paul II participated. What provoked the debate was a trial against the last group of heretical 'Fraticelli', proponents of a radical conception of Franciscan poverty. The project aims to study for the first time the texts produced by the debate, bringing together in a new perspective three different research traditions: the Renaissance papacy, medieval ideals of Christian poverty and humanist theories of magnificence. The first objective of the research is to shed light on the continuities and ruptures between the discussions of 1466 and those of the 14th century, which involved the so-called Franciscan Spirituals, and intellectuals such as William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua. The second objective is to understand the criticism of Paul II's ostentation of wealth by comparing his pontificate with that of his predecessors and successors. After the end of the Western Schism (1378-1417), the Papacy needed renewed ideological support: it is in this political and ecclesiological context that one understands the theories aimed at promoting the magnificence of Rome as the center of the Christian world.
The third objective of the project is to investigate in a comparative framework the impact of humanistic culture in the discourse on wealth and poverty. Historiography on poverty has long emphasized the emergence of a new, more severe attitude towards the poor from the early modern age. But when did this change occur? Which strategies were used to emphasize the secular or religious dimension of magnificence? Which of them were applied to or by the Popes? How were they reconciled with the ideals of Christian poverty?
P.I. Judith Turnbull
2023-2025
The question of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) impacts all areas of society, because it is perceived and experienced by everyone, either as members of underrepresented groups or observers of DEI in practice. It prompts discussion about matters such as discrimination, equal opportunities, equal pay and access to facilities, products and services. The spotlight is predominantly on ethnic and gender diversity, though it also concerns physical disabilities, beliefs, religion and invisible disabilities. The project aims to examine how the question of DEI is construed and communicated in society today, as well as investigating how it reflects, but also shapes our way of thinking and doing. It will focus primarily on corporate discourse (as for example in CSR reports and websites) because of the fundamental role companies can play in promoting DEI in the workplace. However, the project will also take a broader social view and look at the question from two other perspectives. Firstly, it will investigate the legislation of different countries underpinning the values and practice of DEI. Secondly, it will explore DEI from a cultural and psychological perspective in the fields of cinema, literature and education. Research will be conducted on the evolution of the social representation of women and the mentally ill in films and how DEI is framed in young children's literature and in anthologies for literature school exams in the UK. The discourse about DEI in these channels may be a reflection or a criticism of society, but, in any case, an influence on the shaping of the ideas and thoughts of the public. Although DEI propounds and defends universal values and fundamental human rights, it is construed in different ways in different parts of the world, depending on the social, demographic and cultural context of the geographical area. The project therefore aims to illustrate the possible variety of approaches and emphases that can be given to the issues. The expected outcomes of the project are a greater understanding of how the concept of DEI is perceived and discursively constructed today in different social, economic and institutional contexts, the development of corpus resources representing a variety of texts dealing with DEI and recommendations for professionals of communication that promote DEI.
P.I. Elisa Rossi
Participants: Pier Margutti, Laura Gavioli
2020-2023
The project focuses on doctor-patient interaction in oncological consultations. We analyses the interactional dynamics used by specialists to discuss diagnosis and treatment with patients and by which they assess the therapy effectiveness. Our corpus of consultations is video or audio-recorded at Radiotherapy and Oncology facilities in the Emilia-Romagna region. We collected three consultations for each patient: the first meeting with the specialist and two follow-ups. Doctor-patient interactions are studied with qualitative methodologies from different fields such as ethnography, pragmatics, Conversation Analysis, sociology, gender studies and dialogue studies. The aim of the research is to identify the most recurrent communicative practices (both verbal, gestural and proxemic) and their outcomes, with regard to facilitating (or not) patient participation, observing as well the presence of special communication needs on the part of the patients with particular disadvantages. Meetings have been held with the physicians in order to give them feedback on the research results, identify future lines of research, verify hypotheses, and interpretations.
P.I. Matteo Al Kalak
Oct. 2021- Sept. 2023
The project covered the areas of the history of Christianity and the cultural history of the modern age and their accessibility through archives. The main objective was the valorisation, using the new potential of the digital humanities, of documentation of extraordinary historical-documentary interest such as that preserved at the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (where the archive of the Roman Inquisition is kept). The research team included the following researchers: Matteo Al Kalak (P.I.), Laura Turchi, Elena Fumagalli, Giacomo Scarpelli, Elisabetta Menetti and Valerio Nardoni as structured staff. Silvia Toppetta joined the working group as a research fellow. The main results achieved were: 1) the realisation of the beta version of the Digital library of the Historical Archive of the Holy Office (https://addf.arianna4.cloud/); 2) the preparation of a critical edition of the first volume of the Decreta of the Holy Office (1548-1559), an exceptional witness of the birth of the Roman Inquisition; 3) two monographs on topics related to the history of the Inquisition; 4) dissemination initiatives in the academic sphere; 5) communications at research conferences, including initiatives concerning the digital enhancement of documentation from the modern age.
P.I. Vallori Rasini
Participants: Antonello La Vergata (currently retired), Fabio degli Esposti, Annalisa Ferretti, Mauro Mandrioli, Milena Bertacchini, Alessandro Mecarocci (PhD candidate)
spring 2021-spring 2024
The project was dedicated to the interpretation and dissemination of evolutionary theories, especially in Italy and in the Modena area. It deals with the analysis and digitisation of book and correspondence collections in UNIMORE libraries and in the archives of the Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, thanks also to the collaboration with institutions and research centres in the outlying area (especially DHMoRe). A research grant has facilitated the work of selecting and cataloguing texts, the study and evaluation of which has made possible the organizing of workshops and seminars with students and the preparation of a number of dissertations. One of the main results is the digitisation of a substantial number of materials (over 11,000 scans) deposited on the DHMoRe's Ludovico platform: https://lodovico.medialibrary.it/pagine/pagina.aspx?id=1145. Equally significant are the numerous publications of essays and articles by members of the research group. There have also been important initiatives aimed at disseminating the results of the project, such as the recording of 4 video clips presenting as many issues closely related to the topics of evolutionism, made available especially to high schools through the creation of the project's web page: https://www.labibliotecadellavita.unimore.it/ . The specialist journal "Scienza e Filosofia - S&F_" hosted a call for papers proposed by the project ("La teoria dell'evoluzione, tra errori e fraintintendimenti", vol. II, 2022: https://www.scienzaefilosofia.com/sf_n-28_2022/ ); two translations of classics of scientific thought have been produced (E. Haeckel, Storia della creazione naturale, Mimesis, Milan 2024; C. Darwin, Le piante rampicanti. Movimenti e abitudini, Mimesis, Milan, forthcoming) and a concluding conference (21/04/2023, contributions by S. Dominici, G. Scarpelli, A. La Vergata, M. Mandrioli, V. Maggiore, L. Anatrin, F. Brancato, C. Pertile, N. Lovecchio; 28/04/2023, entitled How we remained the only human species on Earth, by T. Pievani). The contributions to the conference were then incorporated, together with essays by other scholars interested in the project topics, in the collective volume entitled A proposito di organismi, evoluzione e conoscenza (Meltemi, Milan 2023).
P.I. Piera Margutti
Participants: Elisa Rossi, Laura Gavioli, Giovanni Tazzioli, Vittoria Colla, Daniele Urlotti
Period: 2022-2024
The project is a continuation of the 'C.ON-2020 (Communication in ONcology), a pilot study on the forms of communication between doctor and patient in oncology' coordinated by Elisa Rossi. While using the same scientific framework and employing the same range of research tools (ethnography, pragmatics, Conversation Analysis, sociology, gender studies, dialogue studies), the IES-22 project has achieved a number of additional objectives. First of all, the basic corpus is much larger, with an additional 30 consultations collected at the breast surgery unit of the Policlinico di Modena - the whole collection thus now includes 107 clinical encounters. Second, two contracted researchers joined the project making it possible to accurately transcribe and revise a large number of interactions, which, in turn, allowed for a fine-grained analysis of all the consultation phases in the various types of oncological treatment represented in the corpus. The focus of research was on communication strategies favouring empathic, inclusive and patient-centred communication (patient-centred communication or PCC). The project explored the structural variants of the clinical encounter and the communication strategies adopted by physicians and patients in relation to the type of treatment, with a particular focus on breast surgery visits. A collection of individual semi-structured interviews addressed to the doctors of the breast unit (12) was also used in order to survey the doctors' opinions and beliefs on the effectiveness and characteristics of communication with the patient during the consultations. An (experimental) training course on medical interaction was carried out involving a group of medical students and some of the doctors who were the subjects of the study. The results of the research have been presented at international conferences, two scientific articles are currently being published and two more are in preparation. A PhD thesis investigating forms of misunderstanding between doctors and patients is currently in preparation.
P.I. Elena Fumagalli
2022-2024
The aim of the Project ARTistiC - Art at Court: Archival Collections and Artistic documentation in the Este Archives was to metadate, digitise and make available to scholars as well as to a wider public one of the most important collections for the history of art preserved in the State Archives of Modena, the so-called 'Arti Belle' fonds of the ‘Archivio per Materie’. The operation was conducted by Dr. Simone Sirocchi (junior researcher) for the scientific part and by Haltadefinizione srl for the technical part. The over 2,300 papers that make up the fonds, together with those of 'Cose d'arte' (another similar documentary portion) are currently being uploaded on the Lodovico Digital Library of the Interdepartmental Research Centre on Digital Humanities of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (DHMoRe) and on the website of the State Archives of Modena. Public accessibility is planned by the end of May 2024. Since ‘Arti Belle’ comes from an archive divided by subject, at the end of the project, on 8 March 2024, a seminar was organised together with the Modena State Archives entitled Archivi per materie / Materiali per la storia dell'arte. Metodi di ordinamento e casi di studio (see attached poster) to compare different examples. The five papers delivered at the seminar (including one by Dr Sirocchi) will be published open access in the journal Quaderni Estensi of the State Archives of Modena. Simone Sirocchi also presented a wider-ranging contribution resulting from research on the ‘Arti Belle’ fonds to the journal 'Storia della critica d'arte. Yearbook of the s.i.s.c.a.'. This contribution (Il fondo 'Arti Belle' dell'Archivio di Stato di Modena per la historiografia artistica della seconda metà dell'Ottocento) will be published in 2024.