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Activity Funded

Institut for Comparative Literature

Instituto de Literatura Comparada

Reference
UID/00500/2025
Project Start Date
2025-01-01
Project End Date
2029-12-31
Principal Investigator
Scientific Area
Humanities
Funding Program
Avaliação UID 2023/2024

Abstract

The 2025-2029 Strategic Plan designed by ILC, LITERATURE AND CARE (FOR THE WORLD): TIME, BODIES, COMMUNITIES proposes a project that takes on the theme of «care» within the field of Comparative Studies. Taking a comprehensive approach to the concept and practice of «care» (as an epistemological, ethical and social turn) as its foundation, this project will promote wider interest in comparative literature by enhancing the public value of literary texts, their connections with the social sphere and their ability to imagine and problematise worlds-to-come. Its guiding thread is the interdisciplinary concept of «care» as more recently popularised and systematised by Joan Tronto, who sees care as extending beyond the domestic sphere and acknowledges its relevance in the public domain, rejecting the subjectivistic bent of the social sciences and humanities, and considering human relations as the foundation of the social and political body by emphasising concern and solicitude for others. Because «care» is concerned with otherness and community, the project aims to endow literature with a renewed social impact, as well as new modalities of commitment, which distances literature from self-referentiality and gives it a bolder public role. It is, therefore, amatter of thinking of care as a general praxis that encompasses all human action towards the defence, perpetuation, and reparation of the world, as well as efforts to foster (co)existence between individuals and communities. Considering that the world over which care is applied encompasses all forms of corporeality and materiality, in a continuum within the living, the project will be developed in three thematic axes of reflection and action conceptually and epistemologically interconnected: time, bodies, and communities. The first axis of our project focuses on the implications of caring for the world, mobilising literature as a hermeneutical apparatus for grappling with complexity, in its relationship with temporality and its various expressions and aporias. The second axis concerns our reflection on how literature can contribute to better ways of caring for the body, which implies attention to issues around multiple forms of corporeality. Finally, the third axis will see us highlight societal questions pertaining to literature’s role in fostering communities of care. As such, we will discuss concepts such as hospitality, empowerment, sustainability, and violence and hostility. Thus, the project articulates and explores new forms of agency that, using the potential of Digital Humanities, promote the dialogue between ethics of care and the Medical and Environmental Humanities.

Institutions

Main Institutions

  • Universidade do Porto Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa (UP ILCML)
  • Universidade do Porto Faculdade de Letras (UP FLUP)

Funding 539.752,65 €

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Portugal

539.752,65 €