As part of the project, two international Workshops will be organised. Each will include two keynote speeches, a methodologically oriented roundtable, and a focus group dedicated to the discussion of ongoing research.
The Workshops are addressed to doctoral candidates enrolled in the PhD programmes in “Philosophy, Science, Cognition, and Semiotics” (University of Bologna) and in “Filosofia” (UNICAMP), with the participation of a selected group of students from the Master’s Degree Programme in Philosophical Sciences (University of Bologna).
The project will also support three international mobility periods for faculty members of the teaching staff and two international mobility periods for doctoral candidates selected through a Call for Abstracts.
A series of complementary scientific and seminar activities will help give greater visibility to the project, while consolidating and expanding the partnership at the international level.
Overall, in the first phase of the project, a historical-genealogical perspective will be adopted, with the aim of bringing into focus the late eighteenth-century context in which the notion of the “rights of man” began to circulate vigorously, becoming—rather than a merely philosophical expression—a fundamental instrument of the new legal and political grammar of modernity. More specifically, by following the common thread of the reception history of works now considered canonical, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), as well as their translations and, at times, distortions, the project will seek to shift attention toward less explored paths, including those concerning two territories that were entirely peripheral in the geopolitical landscape of the time: Italy and Brazil, with the aim of reconstructing the specific features of their respective debates and discourses.
Subsequently, in the second phase of the project, attention will turn to contemporary scenarios, with the aim of exploring the still unresolved tensions in the relationship between the language of rights and female political and legal subjectivity, in an era in which the very cultural project underpinning the logic of “human rights” appears to be collapsing, together with the set of regulative ideals it presupposed—beginning with the necessary connection established between freedom, justice, and peace. Once again, the focus will be placed on foundational texts, but also on the histories of their interpretations and their new translations, some of which will be produced by members of the teaching staff themselves, in order to renew attention to an intertextual and intercultural exchange capable of fostering new paths of comparison and dialogue.