RESEARCH INTERESTS
From 1990 to 1998 Anna Lisa Tota carried out qualitative research in Italy and abroad, participating in national research projects on the sociology of art, sociology of theatre and sociology of museums. She participated as a research assistant in international projects – with funding from the European Community – on environmental policies, public perception of climate issues and sustainability issues in Europe. During the same period, she also dealt with youth disadvantage (with research funded by the municipality of Pieve Emanuele), early school leaving and, finally, gender representations in the media, in order to counter racism and sexism in images, for which she developed the concept of “visual pollution”.
From 1999 to the present, her research has focused mainly on memory studies, with particular attention to the public memories of victims of Italian and international terrorism. She has also investigated issues relating to the political and social sustainability of memories of highly traumatic events and the feasibility of an ecological approach capable of fostering processes of collective re-elaboration of individual, collective and cultural trauma. In addition, she has carried out numerous researches related to the topics of art sociology and museum studies, with reference also to the use of new technologies for museum fruition, especially during the lockdown caused by the Covid pandemic. She has also done research on topics related to music sociology, dealing in particular with soundscapes and acoustic past.
Since 2018, she has been working on issues relating to the application of the concepts of social sustainability and deep ecology by applying them to an ecology of everyday life, which focuses on the one hand on conversations and their potential pathologies, introducing the concept of “eco-words” (2023), and on the other hand on the flow of thoughts and potential forms of polluted thinking, introducing the concept of “eco-thoughts” (2024). She has always been involved in gender studies, with a specific focus on the impact of media imagery in individual and collective narratives of gender identities. In particular, she has researched the social and cultural impact of television series and advertisements, and has proposed the concept of “eco-visions” (2023).
Since 2022 she has been researching individual, collective and public memories of diasporas and migration phenomena, with a specific interest in the narrative modes offered by aesthetic codes and artistic practices.