On Thursday 21 March 2024, at 14:00, at the A. Agnelli Hall, in Androna Campo Marzio 10, Trieste, the ‘HUMAN TRANSFORMATIONS’ conference will take place. It is one of the Department of Humanities’ research projects, including results achieved, open dialogues and new perspectives.

What is the relation between Humanities and the aspect of the human? How can (and should) we rethink this definition today in relation to otherness (non-human animals, the planet, artificial intelligence, the post-human, to name but a few) which the human is opposed to or which it dialogues and interacts with?

It is questions such as these that an extensive interdisciplinary project that the Department of Humanities promoted between 2019 and 2023 has attempted to answer. The conference on 21 March presents the results of this project, in which researchers from all disciplinary areas took part, in order to take stock of what has been achieved and what avenues the joint reflections have opened up for the Department's future research.

Humanities investigate the different ways in which the human can be read, represented and analysed in our present through a constant reference to what happened in the past. Each discipline continually revises and rethinks its paradigms and methodologies of study, but what remains constant is an open question about what the humanities understand as human and its transformations.

Diving into the transformations of the human means, in fact, bringing into play the different perspectives that ground our research and interests, the way they are articulated in disciplines that focus each time on the various aspects that contribute to forming the complexity of our humanity.

What human beings tell, represent, declare about themselves, the practices and gestures that they construct to form the constellation of the human itself cannot depend on unambiguous definitions that are fixed once and for all, but are part of a movement made up of continuous wondering, rethinking and questioning.

The conference, organised by the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste, is open to the public.

The complete conference programme can be found in the attachment below.