The group Culture, Art and Conflict (CAC) builds on a consistent 10-year research agenda aimed at understanding difference and conflict as basic meaning making strategies. By using a critical-interpretative approach, with a clear historical-contextual intent, as well as empirical methodologies, CAC produces theoretically informed original scholarship that questions the ways in which cultural, literary and media criticism engage with the complexity arising from the awareness of conflictual interaction.
CAC fosters a dialogue on the multiple ways in which conflict supports and constrains the production of meaning in modernity, how the representation of conflict across several media works and how it frames scholarship within the humanities. Its research focuses on the role played by the arts (literature, visual arts, film and performance) in the double work of conflict as creation and disruption.
The group will, first, articulate empirical and practice-based research on the production of artistic work in conflict situations (from the post-Cold War and Portuguese Colonial War to the Iraq and Syria wars) and: a) representational conflicts and the memory of the event; b) ‘artchiving’ conflict and the structure of technological mediation; c) artistic practices and the transition to conviviality.
Secondly, the group will also take a meta-approach to propose a reflection on the theories and practices that have structured the intellectual discourse of the humanities and how these are impacted by the tensional lines of recent societal development (war and forced migration; new colonialisms; digital exclusion; surveillance and the demise of privacy; conflicting notions of humanity; planetary exhaustion). The ‘Conflicted Humanities’ approach will place the methodological and conceptual framework of humanistic research at the center of a new discourse about the changing place of human culture and the academic humanities in general under the persistent violence of the 21st century.
The research team:
Researchers
Isabel Capeloa Gil
Adriana Martins
Ana Fabíola Maurício
Diana Gonçalves
Filomena Guarda
Gerald Bär
Luísa Leal de Faria
Luísa Santos
Maria do Rosário Lupi Bello
Martina Emonts
Paulo Miguel Martins
Paulo Campos Pinto
Sara Magno
Sofia Pinto
Tânia Ganito
Collaborating researchers
Gabriela Terenas
João Borges da Cunha
Leonor Sá
Mónica Dias
Sarah Nagaty
Suzie Marra
PhD students
Alfredo Brant
Amadea Kovič
Amani Maihoub
Ana Dinger
Annimari Juvonen
Brian Ambulo
Clara Caldeira
Dora Fernandes
Dzifa Peters
Eduardo Prado Cardoso
Eiji Komatsu
Ekaterina Cordas
Federico Bossone
Gloria Adu-Kankam
João Biscainho
Linda Koncz
Manon Klein
Mário Avelar
Nina Danilova
Rissa Miller
Rodrigo Marcondes
Rola Yousef
Teresa Costa
Teresa Pinheiro
Vera Herold
Victoria Page
Zohar Iancu
