ITALIAN VERSION
The event Cultures and Identities in Europe is an online course, available from 24 February 2020. It was realized thanks to the contribution of: Anna Triandafyllidou (Full Professor at EUI), Sabrina Marchetti (Associate Professor at Venice University) and Jeremie Molho (Research Associate at EUI). The course is divided into 3 weeks, this short report summarizes the last one.
During the last week, the concept of cultural industries were presented. Cultural is generally associated to the idea of freedom. Nowadays, culture is also seen as a resource for economic investments, business and industry developments. Moreover, culture has become the essence of a new public sphere between the state and the individual, on which, over the last 250 years, contestation and legitimization of political and socioeconomic power have been based. For this reason, people like Theodor Adorno and more recently Pierre Bourdieu affirm that culture is a tool in the hands of the ruling class and the state. On the opposite side, intellectuals such as those from the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies argue that cultural activities developing around music, leisure, clothes, consumer objects can also become active forms of symbolic resistance.
