why compare?

The summer school was prompted by the intellectual urgency of comparison in the humanities today. With the emergence of new investigative frameworks (e.g. global history, world literature, the ethnological turn in disciplines like music, the emergence of transcultural objects and approaches), comparison has become a vital focus for critical debate, both within and between disciplines. Why compare today? And how? These are among the questions explored in the School.

Today, we witness an accrued inventiveness of comparative method (with a commitment to experiment, to the development of dedicated approaches to complex objects and problems) and a new intensity of theoretical speculation as to the scope of comparison to precipitate change in our understanding both of objects and of disciplines (whether established and emergent, e.g. cultural studies, visual studies).

comparison and critical thinking

The school aimed to help participants to develop an understanding of how comparison arises within and across disciplines, as well as in the specific fields in which you may be working: thus, the potential and the difficulties of comparison may ultimately be best understood comparatively. An important aim of the School has been to provide a space of debate to explore how comparative practices today can shape research questions — how, for example, conceptual coherence can be achieved in such research; how comparison leads to conceptual and analytical innovations; how comparison gives rise to its own characteristic forms of analysis (for instance, thematic or formal, as well as chronological); how in comparison relations may be more important than identities; how marked temporal or spatial diversity among objects can shape and assist discovery.

who?

The School included participants from universities in Ireland, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States.