Research Network on Love
The Research Network on Love brings together over 80 scholars and postgraduate students from across the Humanities at The University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University and beyond.
Members of the network share an interest in love. Love seems to be everywhere in our everyday lives and yet love is overlooked or even denigrated as a possible research focus in any number of disciplines, though some are more hospitable to this theme than others. Our analytic strategies and research methodologies are supposed to be informed by rationality and taking love seriously poses a challenge. Still, love is not only already there, in our research, even when we do not acknowledge it; there are those of us who do explicitly work on love (sometimes in the guise of friendship, grief, mourning, hate). What is more, love does not belong to one particular discipline, making it a uniquely interesting topic for an interdisciplinary research network.
Our interest in love is prompted by a series of questions (which is meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive):
- How does love matter?
- How has the word ‘love’ been lost in so much work that addresses people’s relations to each other?
- How does love already underwrite the research that we do?
- How do people make space for researching love?
- How does taking account of love affect research methodologies?
- How is it possible to write, as a scholar, ‘with’ love?
- Can love be known?
- Is love an emotion?
- What are the (dis) continuities of experiences of love across time and cultures?
- How is love represented?
- How do notions of love inform ethics?
The network holds regular seminars and other events. If you are interested in the research network, please contact us at researchonlove@manchester.ac.uk.
The network is currently convened by Maja Zehfuss, Elizabeth Dauphinée, Cristina Masters and Véronique Pin-Fat, all in the Centre of International Politics, The University of Manchester.
Love in Our World
Love in Our World is a multidisciplinary conference through which participants will attempt to trace some of the contours of love in their professional and artistic work, in what might be termed a desire to give expression to our understandings of love and its impact on and meaning for our lives. More details.