Progetti di ricerca

SEACHANGES

Identity politics, cosmopolitical rights, and local community in a circum-atlantic context.

Settori produttivi progetti di ricerca Settore uno

Tipologia finanziamento PROGETTI DI RICERCA DI ATENEO (Finanziamenti di Ateneo)

Ambito disciplinare Lingue

Data avvio: 1 February 2004

Data termine: 31 December 2006

Durata:

Partecipanti

Anna Scacchi

William Boelhower

Maria Taglioli

Anna Fornari

Corinna Baschirotto

Partner: studiosi europei, americani, africani

Abstract:

In recent years the debate over issues of identity, rights, and citizenship has remarkably intensified, and has demonstrated how profound the conflict is among western and non-western intellectuals when it comes to interpreting such fundamental notions as universalism, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, the politics of difference and nationalism. A new paradigm regarding questions of identity is now emerging and it has identified in the circum-atlantic area a matrix capable of reading modernity in ways that are richer than those based on such binarisms as cosmopolitanism/patriotism and nation/community.
Our research group - from its privileged position as a "border" area marked by past and present migrations, as is the case of the Veneto region, but firmly anchored to a transnational vision the principal objective of which is the institutionalization of relations between its members and the international scientific community - proposes to center its investigation on the relations between the politics of identity and the axis cosmopolitanism/local community. The primary scope of this project is that of organizing an international forum for discussing and studying the cultural, literary historical and political materials that emerge from the adoption of the circum-atlantic world as a research paradigm. Convinced that the compartmentalization of disciplines and their separation according to national perspectives constitutes a serious obstacle to the development of a comparative and intercultural perspective that is currently taking shape in the world's major universities, and that Italian academia risks remaining anchored to obsolete paradigms that will eventually condition its competitive capacity in an international community based on the free exchange of teachers and students, we intend, with our project, to institutionalize the transcultural and transnational dialogue involving the Americas, Europe, and Africa, both within the university of Padua - by offering those scholars who are studying such topics opportunities to meet and to collaborate in an interdisciplinary exchange - and by initiating discussion within an international ambience, with the transformation of individual and occasional relationships that the members of our group already have into a valid network of organized and enduring research that in the near future can also produce an analogous international community at the pedagogical level, specifically in the context of post-graduate opportunities. In particular, our exchange program with universities that already have a consolidated experience in the field of e-learning (Heidelberg and Mainz), and with whom or Department has collaborated in specific didactic moments of experimentation, in order to permit us to accelerate the process of including important modalities of this kind in our regular teaching practice.

Note: SSD: L-LIN/10 L-LIN/11