Project Portugal 2030

Summary

This project complies with aims ODS4 – Quality Education, ODS5 – Gender Equality, ODS10 – Reduce Inequality within and among Countries, and ODS16 – Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions (the original writing at the U.N site says “Promote Peaceful and Inclusive Societies”), from the list of Sustainable Development Goals 2030, defined by the United Nations. In detail, the concrete aims of this project are: 1- To propose necessary reforms to make national syllabi for literary education more open to cultural diversity and multicultural perspectives, integrating in the study of Portuguese literatures and language, texts from several cultures and countries where Portuguese is spoken. 2- To propose educative reforms in order to make syllabi for literary education more balanced in terms of gender representation/ visibility. 3- To confront Eurocentrism, sexism and racism, educating younger generations to avoid these. 4- To promote the status of the Portuguese language as an inimitable asset with international impact. 5- To produce innovative and updated knowledge on the short story as a contemporary literary genre, representative of life styles and dominant ideas of the 20th and 21st centuries, in Europe and in the Global South. 6- To offer suggestions and models for educative reforms which can be applied in other countries wherever a change of mentalities and a greater investment in inclusion is necessary. 7- To disseminate internationally awareness of the quality and creativity displayed by literatures in Portuguese through translations to other languages (French and English). 8- To increase the use of digital resources for literary education. 9- To contribute to society’s digital transition by creating a digital archive that can become 1) an online library of short stories, 2) a shared site for reusable educative activities and learner’s practice for students of Portuguese; 3) a showroom for publications in Portuguese, including references of available translations. 10- To bring about greater mutual knowledge and cultural exchange across the set of Portuguese speaking countries (Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau and the archipelagoes of Cape Verde and S. Tomé e Príncipe) through literary education. 11- To increase awareness of the transnational dimension of literatures in Portuguese, in Portugal and in Europe. 12- To encourage and disseminate in Portugal greater knowledge, interest and respect for cultures and cultural products from the Global South. 13- To disseminate, through translation, texts originally written in Portuguese, making these known across anglophone and francophone contexts (mind that circulation of African literatures in Portuguese across neighbour anglophone and francophone African countries is so far, practically non-existent. We are aiming for innovation in this dimension as well).