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Developing humour literacy: analysing production, content and reception of humour to bring positive change in the public sphere

Project description

Turning tension into a tickle

In today’s polarised society, conflicts and controversies often escalate due to miscommunication and a lack of understanding. Traditional dialogue methods frequently fall short, leaving many issues unresolved or exacerbated. Humour, when used poorly, can further deepen divides, while its potential for positive impact remains untapped. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the HUMLIT project will explore and harness the power of humour literacy to reframe public conflicts. By analysing humour across production, content, and reception, the project aims to enhance dialogue and mitigate conflicts. Spanning 48 months with 25 partner institutions from the EU and beyond, HUMLIT will bridge academic and practical expertise to promote effective humour literacy in society.

Objective

The goal of the project is to find out how humour literacy can be used to reframe the conflicts and controversial issues in the public sphere and bring benefit to European society by promoting dialogue rather than conflict. Humour literacy is understood to be an ability to decipher the signs, references and messages that humorous discourse evokes, and an awareness of the benefits and risks of presenting these messages in humorous form to different audiences, public and private, such as a risk of humour failure, humour scandal, or discriminatory humour. Humour literacy has not been systematically and cross-culturally studied before. We plan to fill this gap by employing a comprehensive analysis of humour on all levels of the communication process: production, content and reception, which corresponds to the three R&I work packages of the project. We want to reach our goal by conducting interviews with humour producers (artists, standup comedians, cartoonists), collecting and analysing humorous content, as well distributing questionnaires and conducting focus group discussions with humour recipients (e.g. visitors of humour or cartoon museums). The staff exchange between 23 partner institutions (15 academic and 8 non-academic ones) from 11 EU and 3 non-EU countries over the period of 48 months. It will be organized in such a way as to create synergy by combining the professional and culture-specific expertise of the academic project participants, who represent diverse fields of study including linguistics, folkloristics, sociology, critical literacy, second language teaching, political communication and computational analysis, with that of practitioners. This will ensure the knowledge exchange between academic and non-academic partners as well between EU and non-EU partners. The project results will be disseminated among academic and non-academic institutions with the specific focus on educational activities which aim at promoting humour literacy.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Coordinator

UNIWERSYTET JAGIELLONSKI
Net EU contribution
€ 96 600,00
Address
UL GOLEBIA 24
31-007 Krakow
Poland

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Region
Makroregion południowy Małopolskie Miasto Kraków
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data

Participants (17)

Partners (5)