Critical Perspectives on Italy: Contemporary Culture & Society

This course provides you with an interactive experience of contemporary life in Italy, by exploring a range of defining features of this country and its people. In-class and on-site lectures will alert you to salient socio-political and cultural phenomena in current Italian life, triggering critical analysis and evaluation of your surroundings. In particular, you will observe and reflect on practices of identity formation, as these are expressed in class, gender, and community relations; political allegiance and conflict; cultural alignment or dissent; social solidarity and artistic innovation.

You will actively and independently deploy the primary modes of sociological research to directly engage the host society: participant observation, interviews, and field-notes. These will provide opportunities to compare your own direct experiences with scholarly literature on contemporary Italy in an attempt to identify specific local expressions of broadly identified social patterns.

This course is taught in English and requires no prior study of Italian language, but your direct engagement with Italian society will expose you to the Italian language in a variety of contexts, and you will be encouraged to extend and apply your developing language skills at whatever level they are.

This course was previously offered under the title: Living Italy: Contemporary Culture & Society
*This course is cross-listed as SOC320