MUSEO-POLIS. A Permanent Seminar on History, Memory and Museums

This course aims to offer different ways of approaching the institutional, social and cultural figure of the museum as a means of understanding the politics of history and memory in Europe, mainly in the Mediterranean area between the 16th and 21st centuries. Symbolic capital, political capital, economic capital and cultural capital participate in the construction and development of the museum as an institution: all these logics will be articulated in 8 monthly webinars (2 hours). The articulation of the course is designed to open up to a wide network of teachers and students, favouring the dissemination of knowledge and multilingualism.

Main topics addressed

• The museum as fabrication of a heritage status in European societies.
• Patrimonialisation, transmission and creation of political cultures and identities.
• Evolution of history and memory from the Ancien Régime to the contemporary crisis of the egalitarian/democratic model of heritage and culture.

Learning outcomes

By studying the normative operations, theoretical discourses and institutional practices that contribute to the fabrication of a heritage status (associate to the museum), this virtual course will allow CIVIS students to analyse the patrimonialisation that projects, transmits and creates an embodiment of national sovereignty, collective identities and ways of sharing culture. The evolution of the paradigms of values associated with heritage actualises in different ways a general relationship with the past and the "memorabilia", which can be analysed as many strategies of global rewriting of history by certain communities. This approach to the phenomenon of heritage in diachrony may, for example, take into account the conception of heritage as a treasure of sovereignty in the early modern age, and then the advent of heritage as a repository of the citizenship values of the 19th century nation state, or, finally, the emergence and the contemporary crisis of the democratic model and its egalitarian sharing of heritage and culture.