Beyond Borders: The Role of the Humanities in Reimagining Communities
In a world marked by deepening divides—national, ideological, economic, and epistemological—the question of how communities are formed, sustained, negotiated, and transformed has become urgent. Beyond Borders: The Role of the Humanities in Reimagining Communities, invites scholars to explore the humanities’ critical role in interrogating, challenging, and reshaping notions of belonging and exclusion, of walls and bridges, of the individual and the collective.
The traditional concept of community has long been tied to territorial, linguistic, or cultural boundaries. Reimagining communities beyond borders means not only envisioning new models of human connection but also critically examining the limits and consequences of inherited frameworks.
As the host city, Lisbon embodies the complexities of community-making across space and time. Over the centuries, it has been a point of both departure and arrival, rupture and reinvention—a fitting metaphor for the role of the humanities in our contemporary world.
This theme invites interdisciplinary engagement across fields such as, but not limited to, literature, history, philosophy, gender studies, musicology, digital humanities, and postcolonial studies. Areas of particular interest include:
Movement and Travel: imaginative processes of perceiving the Other, at the intersection of observation and projection.
Gendered and Racialized spaces: communities rendered invisible—through anonymity and informality, or retrospectively through historiographical erasure.
Communal Structures: concrete forms of collective life (convents, families, guilds), and abstract communities of shared beliefs or identities (diasporic imaginaries, intellectual movements, etc.).
Circulation and Exchange: material and immaterial goods shaping inclusion, exclusion, the formation of transregional or transhistorical communities.
Ethics and Coexistence: philosophical and ethical frameworks within and across communities.
Political Imaginaries: ideological foundations that sustain or challenge forms of belonging.
Narrative and Community: how language, literary form, and storytelling construct, contest, and reimagine communities across time and geographies.
We welcome proposals from scholars of all disciplinary backgrounds.
Dr. Inês Thomas AlmeidaINET-md, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal