Annual Research Theme
Interdependence
Since 2020, the Franco Institute has supported scholarly engagement with annual research themes of timely and enduring importance to society. To complement the ND Arts Biennial theme of “symbiosis,” we are pleased to announce that the Franco Institute’s annual research theme for 2026-2027 is Interdependence.
With this year’s theme, we invite proposals that probe the interrelations of species, communities, ideas, and economies, past and present. At a personal level, awareness of our shared plight and fate fosters more meaningful connections with others. Catholic thinkers from Thomas Merton to Pope Leo XIV have called us to recognize our interdependence with all living creatures as a basis for love and compassion. Centuries after John Donne’s famous articulation that “No man is an island, Entire of itself,” the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “There is not an inch of my path which does not encroach on the path of another.” Yet, lest interdependence be conflated with assimilation, the novelist Zadie Smith reminds us there are ways of being connected without being the same. “We aren’t required,” she writes, “to be like one another or even to like one another to be in relation. We just need to be willing to create and enter spaces in which solidarity is one of the possibilities.”
Clearly, interdependence is a concept that connects not only living beings but also diverse perspectives, methodologies, and disciplines. Throughout the coming year, the Franco Institute will support research on interdependence by faculty and graduate students across the College of Arts & Letters, culminating in the second annual Day | Merton Symposium in April 2027.