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Presentation
The IETT's current research agenda was organized along three main lines overarched by a global concern "Well-being, Ecology and Technological Society", a focus intended to complicate and nourish our intellectual project beyond linguistic and geo-cultural divisions of knowledge. Within this global, overarching concern the transcultural approach has addressed, through the analysis of textual practice in its broadest sense, the fields of environment (ecocriticism englobing the ways in which textual practitioners interrogate in diverse ways how we inhabit the world), health and well-being (constantly challenged by the imperatives of the technological society: efficiency-growth-repetition), and of food and nutrition (a source of creativity and the unquestionable circulation of tastes and imaginaries but also of the unequal distribution of wealth and of the threat to human survival in a society dominated by a techno-economic logic). In 2014, the research agenda was defined as follows:
The first research vector, "Gender, identities, intersections" aims to analyse the power relations to which sexual differences are subjected or that they bring about. Eschewing biological determinism, this analysis focuses on the social construction of gender in a constantly evolving world in which sexual and gendered relations are challenged and redefined. Our reflection concerns bodily and sexual practices, sexually codified representations and the discourses which question them.
The second research vector, "Texts, Arts, Contexts" interrogates verbal, visual and aural representations which, understood as differing types of "writing," are linked to the passing of frontiers between the real and the imaginary (putting in question functions usually attributed to writing: objectification, communication and transmission), in literature, image and sound, but also to the passage across space and time (and if writing functions as memory, then intertextuality and transtextuality must play a major part insofar as they interrogate the appropriation of the text, its reinvestment and its re-writing).
The third research vector, "Migration, Diasporas, Citizenship and Safety" focuses on intellectual transference including the circulation of ideas, concepts and theories. The vector of safety associated with the question of political identities (of citizenship) relates directly to questions of diasporic circulation and its problems. In the spirit of 'cultural studies' we attempt to elucidate these issues through the articulation of textual and discursive analyses with social and historical questions. The study of texts and representations associated with the question of migration necessarily steers us into the space of political identities where the emergence of the modern capitalist economy imbricated with Western expansionism has led to displacement, exodus and diaspora on a hitherto unseen scale, the traces of these singular histories accumulate endlessly in memories, texts, languages and practices of a now global modernity.
The first research vector, "Gender, identities, intersections" aims to analyse the power relations to which sexual differences are subjected or that they bring about. Eschewing biological determinism, this analysis focuses on the social construction of gender in a constantly evolving world in which sexual and gendered relations are challenged and redefined. Our reflection concerns bodily and sexual practices, sexually codified representations and the discourses which question them.
The second research vector, "Texts, Arts, Contexts" interrogates verbal, visual and aural representations which, understood as differing types of "writing," are linked to the passing of frontiers between the real and the imaginary (putting in question functions usually attributed to writing: objectification, communication and transmission), in literature, image and sound, but also to the passage across space and time (and if writing functions as memory, then intertextuality and transtextuality must play a major part insofar as they interrogate the appropriation of the text, its reinvestment and its re-writing).
The third research vector, "Migration, Diasporas, Citizenship and Safety" focuses on intellectual transference including the circulation of ideas, concepts and theories. The vector of safety associated with the question of political identities (of citizenship) relates directly to questions of diasporic circulation and its problems. In the spirit of 'cultural studies' we attempt to elucidate these issues through the articulation of textual and discursive analyses with social and historical questions. The study of texts and representations associated with the question of migration necessarily steers us into the space of political identities where the emergence of the modern capitalist economy imbricated with Western expansionism has led to displacement, exodus and diaspora on a hitherto unseen scale, the traces of these singular histories accumulate endlessly in memories, texts, languages and practices of a now global modernity.