Analysis of Political Discourse

The course aims to provide students with tools for understanding political language, both in relation to the ostensiveness (mise-en-scene) of power, and in relation to the differences between democratic language and non-democratic languages.
Within this general framework, the course aims to provide students with the acquisition of knowledge and concepts related to:
- what the institutions are, how they think and how they speak;
- power and legitimacy;
- the foundations of political action: from fear to sympathy;
- what is public history, between identity and belonging, between obedience and freedom;
- nature, tradition, society and community in political language.
- democracy and secularism: their meaning and their fragility with respect to populisms, ethnisms, fundamentalisms.
The objectives of the course are to provide students with an appropriate vocabulary for understanding and expressing themselves on the phenomena examined, as well as offering a key to interpreting topical political dynamics, in the Italian, European and global context, developing on them critical thinking skills and independent judgment.

A) Knowledge and understanding:
Knowledge and understanding of the concepts and theories exposed on institutional thought and political language, on power and its exercise, on democracy and the forms of its crisis, on the characteristics of populism and its language.
B) Ability to apply knowledge and understanding:
Ability to apply the acquired knowledge to the analysis of the political scenario and of the national and international public debate;
C) Autonomy of judgment:
Ability to critically and autonomously interpret the dynamics of transformation of contemporary political language, also with reference to the new forms of political communication in the era of social media;
D) Communication skills:
Ability to express the knowledge acquired with argumentative consistency and language properties.
E) Learning skills:
Develop understanding and autonomous argumentation skills by relating the different thematic areas of the course.