Call for paper on the theme "Dying" (deadline: 20 January 2010)

The 6° issue of the journal "Snodi. Public and Private in Contemporary History" will be devoted to the theme dying. Indeed, not only is death a natural and inescapable fact in individuals' destiny, but it is also an event with profound social, political and cultural implications, where the intertwining of public and private appears in its most extreme forms.
The editorial board welcomes articles and methodological reflections on dying in specific historical contexts, with particular attention to the ways in which it is conceived and regulated; to those who legislate on and interpret it; to the practices and rites that accompany it; to the interaction between private languages, political discourse and mass communication. We are interested in the ways in which the practices of dying influence those of living, through mentalities, writings, memories and story telling. We are also interested in the transformation that science, religion, politics and culture impose on these practices; and on the conflict between private mourning (which remains the exclusive patrimony of individuals or small groups) and public mourning, which serves to forge a sense of belonging and collective identity. We would like to analyze and explore the protagonists of the social experience of dying in different historical and social contexts: who establishes the borders between life and death; who decides the moment of the end of life; who organises the rites that surrounds it; who deals with the moral and the memory of dying. It would be particularly significant to understand when and how the forms and practices of dying change, also in relation to moments of political upheaval, in terms of cultural transformations or solicited by social movements.

Contributors are invited to send:

- For the section Writing (Scrivere): a half page abstract for an article in either Italian or English of roughly 20 pages (40.000 characters spaces included)
- For the section Sources of the self/Sources of the collective self (Fonti dell'io/Fonti del noi): a half page abstract for an article in either Italian or English of roughly 20 pages (40.000 characters spaces included, and including the sources), which analyse the methodological problems of the theme and/or the specificity of the sources used.

Proposals should be sent to the address snodi.pubbliciprivati@gmail.com, with a short biographical note and a short list of the author's principal publications. The authors of articles in English, when English is not the first language, should have their text already proofread by a mother tongue reader before sending it. The articles for the section Writing are subject to peer review.
Proposals will be selected by 15 February 2010.

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Snodi*. Public and Private in Contemporary History
(*S-nodi combines the word «snodi», which means crossroads, and the word «nodi», which means junctions)

This project is the result of collective reflections around the concepts of «private» and «public». It seems to us that much contemporary historiography has been unable to overcome the dichotomy between a historical perspective that is almost entirely political and institutional on the one hand, and a perspective that focuses almost exclusively on individuals and their subjectivity on the other. Instead, what we find in our everyday experience as researchers, particularly for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is a space between public and private which is both complex and fluid; it is a space where the individual oscillates between the two spheres, but at the same time a space across which the state, public institutions and collectives intervene into the area of private experience. The aim of our project is to explore the ways in which this interaction takes shape and to analyse the dynamics of change and modification that this interaction generates.

Giulia Albanese, Margherita Angelini, Claudia Baldoli, Tommaso Baris, Emmanuel Betta, Giulia Beltrametti, Alessandro Casellato, Simon Levis Sullam, Erika Lorenzon, Giovanni Sbordone, Simona Troilo, Gilda Zazzara.
snodi.pubbliciprivati@gmail.com
www.studiolt2.it