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

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.