LIterature For Empowerment against manipulation

LIFE examines if and how literary reading can be used to help raise awareness of disempowering manipulative influences exerted by one’s environment and the media and foster empowerment to mitigate their effects.

It will develop a new cross-disciplinary tool to measure literature’s potential effects on manipulation perception and on the sense of empowerment.

It will provide an ‘empowerment canon’ of expert-selected and empirically validated literary texts that can be particularly helpful in this task.

The tool will draw from the disciplines of literary studies, psychology, sociology, and communication and will be empirically tested and validated in two diverse countries: Italy and the United States. The media and the environment can exert disempowering influences on one’s life.

Indeed, the news, advertising, gaming and social media industries often propel insecurity, social division, consumerism and addictive behaviours, while one’s immediate environment may imbed limiting beliefs and conformism.

While the empirical study of literature has been able to show some of literature’s prosocial effects, its potential impact on kindling the sense of empowerment is yet to be determined.

LIFE tackles this challenge by researching how literature can help raise awareness of such disempowering manipulative influences and foster empowerment. LIFE will advance the emergent interdisciplinary research area of the empirical study of literature.