Call for applications

LYNX Summer School 

“Dissonances. Re-interpreting and re-assessing difficult heritage”

13-14-15 July 2023

IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca

Piazza San Francesco 19, Lucca (Italy)


Call for applications


Re-interpreting difficult heritage has been at the center of recent public and academic debate, through among others the Confederate monuments’ discussion, the Rhodes Must Fall and the Black Lives Matter protest movements, addressing issues of occupying public space and re-assessing the colonial, traumatic and difficult past. These phenomena also involve communities and scholarship worldwide, questioning the colonial and dissonant material traces and legacies that are still visible in public spaces (from small hamlets to global megalopolis), and urging cultural institutions and practitioners to come to terms with these issues. Which display processes and practices can be employed or designed by institutions preserving cultural heritage (museums, libraries, galleries, etc.)? How are scholarships of different orientations taking these instances into account? Which endeavours are art practitioners putting to work to deal with memories (collective, communitarian, personal) of traumatic, difficult pasts? 

Starting from the notion of difficult heritage (Macdonald 2010, Carter & Martin 2019, Malone 2019), we are interested in addressing and analyzing, on a case-study basis,  the dissonances that emerge from conflictual interpretations of spaces and contexts  (monuments, street names, museums, archives, collections, buildings, etc.) across different historical periods and geographies.

The school is centered around an interdisciplinary approach, aiming at creating a dialogue among different fields of research and areas of inquiry from the social sciences (sociology, art management, cultural economy, anthropology, law, etc.) and humanities (art history, archaeology, aesthetics, digital humanities, curatorial studies, museum studies, history, etc.).

Acknowledging the current growing interest in the decolonial option (Mignolo & Walsh 2018) as a lens through which we can scrutinize these cases, the Summer School does not limit itself to this theoretical framework but instead calls for multiple and diverse methodological approaches, questioning the very applicability of a single lens by centering the specificities of different case studies. 

The Summer School will offer the occasion to deepen those frameworks, propose new methodological approaches, and take inspiration from international case studies.


The call is open to PhD students and early-stage researchers interested in submitting their proposal on the following topics:





The Summer School will be held in English. The program will be constantly updated, so please check our website and social profiles.