CFP: HERMES Summer School 2025
What Matters in the Humanities
HERMES summer school
16-20 June 2025
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
St. Charles Campus
Organising team
Alice Borrego, Charlotte Chassefière, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Molly Gilbertson, Tim Gupwell,
Théo Maligeay, Katia Marcellin, Constance Pompié, Christine Reynier
Keynote speakers (provisional) :
- Guillaume Le Blanc, Université Paris Cité, France,
- Stephen Ross, University of Victoria, Canada.
Call for papers
In the wake of the previous HERMES Summer Schools, that addressed such issues as vulnerability, hospitality, sustainability, among others, this session will investigate problems of visibility and invisibility and their ethical resonance in the field of literary and cultural studies. It also aims at interrogating the contribution of the research produced in the humanities to the central question of “What Matters.”
We are expecting papers in various fields including literature (fiction, poetry, graphic novels, etc.), drama, film, serial studies, visual studies, and more generally cultural studies. Here is an open outline of the issues we are interested in, along with potential topics for papers:
•Visibility and Invisibility: Exploring the dynamics of making lives, individuals, and groups visible or invisible. Investigating the political and artistic struggles aimed at recognizing marginalized voices.
•Mechanisms of Selection and Discrimination: Investigating the mechanisms, operations, and levers involved in selecting, prioritizing, and discriminating between what counts and what does not in various contexts.
•Conditions for Questioning “What Matters”: Exploring the conditions and contexts that lead to the emergence of the question “What matters.” Examining frameworks of perception, attention modalities, and the intelligibility of what is audible, visible, and tangible.
•Power of Language and Narrative: Analyzing the transformative power of language and narratives to shape the world, obscure realities, or expose truths. Exploring how narrative can address injustices in storytelling.
•Cultural Narratives: Examining how cultural narratives contribute to individual and collective awareness and mobilization against denial in social and political spheres.
•Ethical Considerations: Discussing the ethical dimensions of questioning “What matters,” including attention to otherness, singularity, and vulnerability. Exploring the interdependencies and relationality of subjects, including observers, witnesses, and researchers in the humanities.
•Temporal and Contextual Dimensions: Examining the temporal and contextual aspects of questioning “What matters” and how it challenges existing categories of thought and research methodologies.
These topics provide a broad framework for potential papers that delve into the complexities of understanding and investigating “What matters” in various cultural, social, and political contexts.
We expect 300-word abstracts (with Otle) and a short bionote (50-100 words), including the PhD student’s email address by 1 December 2024. These should be sent to jens.kugele@gcsc.uni-giessen.de
You can access the full CfP document here.