In the first part of the course, classic theoretical approaches will be analyzed, with particular reference to the mainstream capacity to weaken or strengthen the perception of public safety, without forgetting the most recent media theories. The sociology of media will be connected to the theory of communication action, aimed at investigating the interactional practices of everyday life. The aim is to stimulate and share a culture of comprehension influencing the communicative strategies of complex society. In this sense, the process of individualization marking digital modernity highlights the lack of attraction exerted by traditional symbolic universes: this scenario can be described by the overlapping of national situations and community institutions, without neglecting the management of public safety/insecurity.
The second part of the course focuses on the study of total institutions investigated by Erving Goffman in reference to the processes of reification and oppression of individuals that to some extent impinge on certain social contexts. The beginning of Goffman’s Asylums is self-explanatory: “A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example, providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws. This volume deals with total institutions in general and one example, mental hospitals, in particular. The main focus is on the world of the inmate, not the world of the staff. The chief concern is to develop a sociological version of the structure of the self”. Goffman describes “what really happens” in a total institution, without recourse to that scientific, therapeutic or moral rhetoric used by those who manage the institutions to justify the abuse of power over human beings. In Asylums, Goffman carries out a sort of moral exercise while trying to overthrow the claim that institutions impose their logic on social sciences, in order to emphasize, through the sociological investigation of simple gestures, the human dimension of the contrast to oppression, as it is nowadays possible to acknowledge about more subtle, codified repressive phenomena somewhere between censorship and isolation.