Conference Program

Rather than approaching memory as archival preservation or commemorative ritual, the project conceptualized the memory of suffering as a living, dialogical, and contested space (Petit, 2023). Within digitally mediated environments, students were invited to reinterpret historical traces, testimonies, and educational artifacts, transforming them into shared objects of inquiry (Rivoltella & Panciroli, 2019). In this process, memory became a civic practice: a site where narratives are negotiated, responsibilities redistributed, and meanings collectively produced (Trione, 2022; Medrado & Rega, 2023).

The digital spaces of MOdE (Museo Officina dell’Educazione) functioned not merely as repositories of content but as epistemic infrastructures enabling collaborative authorship, critical debate, and reflexive positioning (Panciroli, 2016). Through structured pedagogical design, students enacted forms of participation that blurred the boundaries between learning and civic engagement, between research and political agency. Teaching thus operated as a form of activism by creating the conditions for public reasoning, while research became activism insofar as it generated situated knowledge oriented toward democratic re-signification (Rancière, 1991).

The study argues that engaging with the memory of suffering (Sontag, 2003) in digitally mediated cultural spaces can foster forms of citizenship grounded in relational responsibility and critical remembrance (Stern, 2010). In doing so, it contributes to ongoing discussions on how higher education can reimagine democracy not as a fixed institutional arrangement but as a practice continuously co-constructed through acts of shared interpretation and ethical engagement.