Making Sense of a Contested Past: Years of Lead in Italy and their Memory Over Time

• In Event: 4322 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. What History Can, and Can't, Teach Us

Abstract

In this paper, I present Italy as a case study to better understand the mechanisms by which State promoted collective memories of controversial events emerge and change over time within democratic contexts. Specifically, I look at memories of violent events created and diffused by State actors in form of narratives. Drawing from a dataset of about 11,000 archival documents produced by a special Parliamentary Commission during the period 1987-2001, I analyze how the Italian State has come to terms with the decade 1969-1980, known as Years of Lead: an intense season of political violence, including failed coups d’état, kidnappings, and violent attacks, carried out by semi-clandestine extremist groups from both right-wing and left-wing ideologies. I analyze the different accounts produced by multiple actors within the Italian Parliament, showing how they emerged and changed/remained stable over time. I apply a mixed method approach that combines text mining - specifically words frequency, words correlation, and topic modeling, as explorative methods of distant reading of the full set of documents - with in-depth content analysis of a sample of the data. This approach merges and compares distant and close reading of textual data to maximize the analyses and contribute to our understanding of the production of collective memories in novel ways.

Author

• Sabrina Nardin, University of Arizona