La nuova sede fiorentina della Scuola Normale ha una storia antica e una contemporanea che vale la pena di ricordare perché si intreccia con le vicende che da qualche anno a questa parte coinvolgono i centri storici delle città italiane ed europee. Nella metà degli anni ’70, il medioevale Palazzo Vegni è infatti stato occupato […]

Lo scorso 18 marzo la Classe di Scienze politico-sociali della Scuola Normale Superiore ha ospitato un confronto ad ampio raggio sullo stato dell’università in Italia. Lo spunto iniziale è stato dato da una riflessione sulle analisi e proposte del Tavolo tecnico” per la Strategia italiana in tema di ricerca fondamentale del 2022, cui ha fatto […]

Universities are under attack, and there is an urgent need for reflection on the international context and the developments in Italy, their social role, the resources available and the institutional changes taking place. This set of problems will be addressed in the meeting ‘The Future of the University in Italy’ that the Scuola Normale Superiore […]

The conference – organised by COSMOS – Centre on Social Movement Studies of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore – focuses on renewed interest in class issues within social movements and labor studies. The event will take place on May 26 and 27, 2025. Theoretically, it aims to bridge these fields […]

The history of housing occupations in Florence, the situation today and an exibition on the occupation of Palazzo Vegni in 1976 are the ingredients of this public meeting to be held in Italian in Palazzo Vegni, on March 18th at 5 pm La storia delle occupazioni a Firenze, il ritorno della questione abitativa in città […]

Conveners: Manuela Caiani and Hans Joerg Trenz (SNS) Financial and logistic support Scuola Normale Superiore, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Florence   The Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence, Italy) invites applications from doctoral students for  the 2025 Ph.D. School on Visual Analysis and Contentious Politics. The PhD School will be  held at the Palazzone di […]

“A Nation gripped by moral panic” an essay by Donatella Della Porta on Qantara, a German portal that presents itself as “The dialogue portal founded in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and has been promoting understanding between European and Islamic societies for over 20 years through well-founded contributions. The project […]

The Global Movement in Solidarity with Palestine The conference “The Global Movement in Solidarity with Palestine and Its Repression,” hosted by the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) on November 28–29, 2024, in Florence, brought together a diverse and engaged audience. The event witnessed high attendance, underscoring the urgency and global resonance of the topics discussed. Scholars, […]

Legal mobilisation has been broadly theorised and empirically studied as a repertoire of contentious action within the inter-disciplinary scholarly field of social movements and the law. Even though it attracted significant interest from scholars across a number of disciplines, it has been studied to very different extents depending on the policy fields and social movements […]

The International Conference Feminism as a Method: Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, and Methods in the Social Sciences will be held at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore, on November 14th and 15th. Organized by Anastasia Barone, Giada Bonu Rosenkranz, and Donatella della Porta, this event will bring together scholars from various countries […]

In recent months, institutions and the media have targeted artists, activists, intellectuals and students in solidarity with Palestine, including Jews. Protests have often been repressed as anti-Semitic, triggering, especially in Germany, a ‘war on anti-Semitism’ that criminalizes criticism of Israel. While recognizing episodes of anti-Semitism linked to the extreme right, this ‘war’ has been exploited […]

An emergency critical juncture such as a pandemic, the need to communicate probelmatic policies in a mont of anxiety and stress in which “communication and participation are particularly important in dealing with these crisis contexts, representing the very basis for collective involvement”. “Comunicare e partecipare durante una pandemia” (pp.224, Il Mulino) is the result of […]

Professor Donatella Della Porta from Scuola Normale Superiore and director of the Cosmos Lab is the winner of the 2024 edition of the ‘John D. McCarthy Award’, a lifetime achievement award presented by the Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. The award will be presented during a […]

Attraverso una lunga rassegna di casi concreti, Donatella Della Porta, direttrice di Cosmos, descrive il processo per cui la lotta istituzionale all’antisemitismo in Germania, inizialmente promossa dalla società civile progressista, si è trasformata nella costruzione di un apparato statale e di una struttura di potere ufficiale come strumento di razzializzazione e repressione.

Donatella Della Porta, Cosmos Lab director, has researched on “Regressive movements in time of emergency” using the case of protests against anti contagion measures. In this case as in many others (from the conservative “anti gender”  European farmers) protesters pictured themselves as an abused minority of powerless victims fighting against some hidden and organized power. This frame seems to be a version of those being used by populist (mainly far-right) parties against Europe. We asked Della Porta to explain why and how conspiracy theories and this kind of posturing is keen to fall for the political offer of rightwing parties.