Cultural factors contribute in structuring the symbolic environment in which contentious politics take place. Among these factors, collective memories are particularly relevant: memory can help collective action by drawing on symbolic material from the past, but at the same time can constrain people's ability to mobilize, imposing proscriptions and prescriptions.
In my research I analyse the relationship between social movements and collective memories: how do social movement participate in the building of public memory? And how does public memory, and in particular the media representation of a contentious past, influence the social construction of identity in the contemporary movements?
To answer these questions I focus on the student movement in Italy and Spain and I analyse content and format of media sources in order to draw a map of the different narrative representations of a contentious past and to investigate their influence on contemporary mobilisations.
In this paper, I focus in particular on the evolution of the representation of specific events in the Italian and Spanish student movements of the 60s and 70s in the different public fields, identifying the role of terrorism and political transitions in shaping in the present the image of the past publicly discussed. My goal is to understand how intense seasons of political violence, like the Italian “years of lead” or the Spanish transition, shape and filter the memory of previous and related social mobilisation. The paper draws on a critical discourse analysis of media material, tracing the phases of the commemoration, putting it in historical context and aiming at reconstructing the different mechanisms of contentious remembrance. Furthermore, I refer to interviews to contemporary student activists, aiming at assessing the relationship between the public memory of a violent past and the strategic choices, in particular referring to the repertoires of protest, of contemporary movements.
