Massimo Canevacci 2008 - Open letter to the Faculty of Communication Sciences La Sapienza Rome New choices of the Faculty of Communication Sciences, University "La Sapienza" force me to make public a number of concerns, because, in the face of an undeniable crisis of the three-year it was decided to restructure the order of the studies according to a vision of restorative and crushed on the existing communication. In this way, the science of communication is likely to shrink to a professional journalistic
preparation, the experimental and cross-disciplinary connections with the results in digital communication (extended mix of design, architecture, advertising, performance, music, fashion, art, etc. .) are often misunderstood, "uncontrolled" or neutralized in "technical" and are ignored, as a result, those researchers who are trying to change paradigms exhibition, expressive compositions, narratives multisequential. This trend shut himself communication in journalism and feeble apology weakens the faculty of the media, officials of changes in the teachers' "cultural industry", trains the students to surrender and assent disciplined innovation, professionalism crossing closes at new visions, styles, languages, is indifferent to the prospect that some time in universities abroad are applied in this context (see the role of cultural anthropology in Media Studies in many foreign universities - MIT, Humboldt Universität, Escola de Comunicação e Arte, University of São Paulo, with whom I established a trade agreement between teachers and students). All this is likely to set up provincial disciplinary endogamy mass-media, distrust of the emerging, digital subtraction of the potential. The subject I taught for over 20 years - Cultural Anthropology, basic subject for students in first year - has been abolished, while in Rome, Italy and elsewhere, it would be necessary to multiply the research with this orientation, in order to counter the dangerous racist , locks local content, the top-decision makers, the media pettiness. It is preferred, however, point to materials "classic" (law and history), eliminating the first of the three key disciplines of social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology). The teacher who taught it is "exiled" to the third year of the degree of cooperation and development with a substance called Intercultural Communication. In the title of course expresses the continuity of a neo-colonial domination of the West to an "other" world: the "cooperation" is focused to give financial aid to students and to their countries of residence, rather than to the ' other ", should now be evident, and the criticism of the concept of" development "have been written so many essays before and after the '68 just remember that it is boring. So you create a field as Intercultural Communication, that name since the closure reinforces identity and culture, scientific and educational regressions, which unfortunately appear to be inconsistent with those policies, "league Roman" appropriate to the prevailing climate in which a sticky Catholicism seeks to control governments and oppositions, colleges, faculty, teachers . The references in my chair was inspired is located, among others, in the anthropological vein opened by Gregory Bateson who, from his research in advance Bali, allowed to build up the double bind of the most extraordinary concept is applied communications "normally" psycho-pathology that the nascent mass media, until his early collaboration with Vienna for research on cybernetics. Rather than engage in saints and madonnas, processions and proverbs - themes too often exclusive teaching of this subject from us - the anthropological research of Bateson is inserted in the flow time were already emerging communication technology, otherness. Finally, this letter does not claim nothing personal (I retire next year and then leave this Faculty). It expresses a political and cultural positioning that locates in the growing and seemingly irreversible crisis of the Faculty of Communication Sciences, a problem to address critical reflection in the interests of teachers, students, office workers: those living and breathing the air of a university that seeks to make sense of possible futures and not simply to replicate the worst of these publicized.
maxx.canevacci @ gmail.com
