di Palma, Sara Valentina, Post Doc

By Katherine Harrison on 21 May | 0 comments

Biographical notes:
Sara Valentina Di Palma (Vigevano PV, Italy, 1977) is Ph.D. in Political Science, Researching Associate in Contemporary History (Dept. of History, Faculty of Humanities, Siena University) and Research Assistant at the chairs of Contemporary History and of Comparative History (Communication Sciences Department, Faculty of Humanities at Siena University). She is member of the research team Holocaust Trauma Research Project, directed by Dr. Dori Laub (Yale University, Dept. of Psychology)and of the SHCY (Society for the History of Children and Youth) and SISSCO (Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea / Italian Association for the Study of Contemporary History).

Among her publications in English: Marcello Flores, Anna Cesano and Sara Valentina Di Palma, Recommendations to Italian authorities for the fulfilment of ECHR obligations, Juristras Report, 2009, www.juristras.eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/recommendations-to-italian-authorities-for-the-fulfilment-of-echr-obligations.pdf ; Marcello Flores, Anna Cesano and Sara Valentina Di Palma, Strasbourg Court Jurisprudence and Human Rights in Italy: An Overview of Litigation, Implementation and Domestic Reform, Juristras Report, 2009, www.juristras.eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/italy.pdf ; Jews, homosexuals, gypsies: Persecutions, identities, memories, in J.-D. Steinert, I. Weber-Newth (eds), Beyond Camps and Forced Labour. Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution, Osnabruck, Secolo Verlag, 2008, pp. 378-390; <!--[endif]-->History and Memory of Children and Adolescents in the Holocaust, in J.-D. Steinert, I. Weber-Newth (eds), Beyond Camps and Forced Labour. Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution, Osnabruck, Secolo Verlag, 2005, pp. 700-711.

GEXcel project, theme 4 & 5 
Violence On Women At War In The Nineties of the 20th  Century
Since the end of World War 2, women are more and more often intentional victims in the wars, above all in the so called asymmetric conflicts, where more or less regular fighters are opposed to civilians.

If, in fact, in the conflicts of the first half of the 20th century, women are victims of abuse of power, privations, deportations, rapes – and in a quantitative increasing measure due to the always increasing involvement of the civil population in comparison to the wars of the previous centuries in which mainly armies frontally lined up on the open battle ground where involved –, yet at the end of World War 2 the wartime attitude towards the female kind starts changing, in a process culminating in the Nineties.

It is in this  period that the target of the conflicts gets different in respect to the traditional wars: not so much the conquest of a territory, as the humiliation and the annihilation of the enemy destroying its self-esteem  and the group solidarity . Apparently the violence against women up to the extreme of the mass rapes has given way to a new, terrible season in which the warfare complex authorizes to  make the women something far worse than a booty: a means of reprisal against the civil society and the fighting men. Women are twofold victims during and after the violence, when they continue more or less openly being threatened by the ex-executioners and when even the communities where they belong reject them branding them as spoiled by the rape they suffered.

GEXcel project, theme 7 & 8
“I want to heal myself by unburdening my heart". De-constructing gendered violence in the Bosnian and Rwandan societies after the Nineties’ conflicts

The war in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda in the Nineties of the XXth Century had a massive use of gendered violence, but women were silenced after the conflicts and the international attention was focused on the reconstruction in the aftermath. Paying attention to the victim’s interiority, suffering, anger, is necessary to change the perspective in investigating gendered violence in contexts like these, where there is an overlapping of wartime violence (physical, psychological, symbolic) and of wife-beating (which again can be physical, psychological, symbolic), and where the victim need to be at the core of any intervention based on a critical rethinking of ethic issues. The aim is to propose a critical and innovative perspective on women as active subject who are not to be seen just as victims but as citizens who want to change their societies by breaking the traditional privileges within the family, within the economy, finally within the public nationalistic construction of sexual, political, social, class and economical paradigms.