Temporal Reinterpretations of Far-Right Violence in Italy: Media and Institutional Narratives

• In Event: 20420 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 10: Text Analysis

Abstract

This work focuses on the cultural legacy of controversial events within the sociological literature on collective memory. I examine the evolving representations of far-right bombing events (called "stragi") during Italy’s "Years of Lead" (1969–2020) through the lenses of political and media discourse, engaging with presentism, which views the past as a malleable construct shaped by current needs, and traditionalism, which regards historical events as enduring legacies. Relying on both text mining and qualitative methods, I analyze all relevant newspaper articles from major Italian outlets and the entire corpus of documents produced by the Italian Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, "Commissione Stragi," to trace the mnemonic trajectories of key far-right bombing events in Italy. Findings reveal that state institutions and media have alternately foregrounded and downplayed these events, contributing to fragmented collective memories and generational divides.

Author

• Sabrina Nardin, University of Chicago