Media studies, digital communication and journalism

The course aims at introducing students to the field of study of political psychology. Politics is defined both as a set of processes involving leaders and shaping the management of public affairs, and as the way in which ordinary people participate to the life of their communities. First of all, the course aims at briefly sketching the historical development of this field of studies. This resumé will start from European scholars describing the "emotional contagion" of crowds on individual decisions and will arrive to describe the most recent advances of contemporary political psychology. Moreover, a distinction will be drawn between democratic leaderships, authoritarian leaderships and totalitarian societies. Societal processes will be analysed, encouraging civic participation in democracies, scarce interest in politics and despise for élites in authoritarian and populist leaderships, or even dependecy and interpersonal suspicion in totalitarian régimes. Finally, the course will explore the particular kind of societal changes, allowing to build again trustful relations between individuals and groups after the end of intergroup violence and war. 1. Knowledge and understanding: the course aims to deepen the theories of political psychology, starting from the classic European approaches developed since the beginning of XX century to the most recent mini-theories developed by present-day scholars, focusing on specialized issues. Among these last contributions, a special attention will be payed to recent advances in the field of multimodal analysis of political communication. In this field of study, specific instances of Italian political communication will be analyzed, aimed at detecting differences between insurgent democratic political speech and populist speech. 2. Ability to apply knowledge and understanding: the course aims to apply the knowledge learned through the analysis of audiovisual documents, related to different kinds of political communication (speeches addressing audiences actually present in front of the leader, talk shows, messages diffused by social media, etc.) 3 – 4 – 5. Transversal skills: the course aims at acquiring critical judgment skills and an analytical and transversal study approach, through laboratory activities that include moments of confrontation in the classroom on specific case studies on Italian political speeches.