The project intends to estimate the impact of the pandemic crisis on the Italian society¿s cultural milieu. Specifically, the project aims at analyzing:
1. if the pandemic has induced a relevant change in the cultural milieu
2. what type of change has been triggered
3. how deep it is such change
what consequence it has/will have in the next future, on individual wellbeing, on communities as well as on the citizen-institutions relationship
To this end, the project will analyze the evolution will occur in next months of the basic, most generalized level of meaning¿ the symbolic universes ¿ characterizing the Italian society¿s cultural milieu as well as the ways these worldviews shape a) attitudes and beliefs concerning aspects that one can expect to be affected by the COVID-19 crisis ¿ representation of migration, of politics and institutions, of interpersonal bond; b) individual modes of thinking and mental health.
The semiotic-cultural psycho-social framework (SCPT) at the grounds of the project, provides a ground-breaking look at social phenomena. The idea of the interpretative and cultural nature of social behaviour and dynamics does not negate the importance of other contextual factors (e.g. inequality, institutional architectures); yet the interpretation of such elements is further decisively enriched by analysing them in terms of their situatedness and participation in the global cultural milieu.
SCPT integrates innovative models developed by lines of thought at the cutting-edge of various social sciences (sociology, anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive sciences, political sciences, linguistics, behavioural economics, semiotics), complemented by constructs (e.g. Dynamic System Theory, Synergetic) from theoretical biology, physics, mathematics. Based on this genuinely multidisciplinary anchorage, SCPT is at the cutting edge of contemporary social science, being one of the new paradigms that have been bringing a breath of fresh air to the field in the last few years .
On this basis, the project is designed to provide 3 major advances in corresponding areas:
a) A holistic understanding of the cultural dynamics of the outbreak crisis in the Italian society.
b) A further development of the SCPT, both thanks to the huge amount of data on which analysis and modelling will be based, is the strict interaction of the highly multidisciplinary scientific team set up by the consortium.