The focus on animals (and animality), as well as the idea that humans have duties towards them and that it is intolerable to treat them as ‘things’ and deny them the faculty of feeling and suffering, has become one of the great issues of our time. It is present not only in civic movements that are highly active in the public sphere, but also in the social and human sciences, where an important field dealing with animals has emerged. Ethics, politics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy: today these disciplines are mobilised in an extensive operation that rescues animals from the silence to which philosophical thought – but not literature or art – has condemned them. The articles presented here deal with this type of reflection, in an interdisciplinary approach.

Palaeoanthropology and ethology, two disciplines to which António Bracinha Vieira has devoted part of his work as a professor and researcher, provide important scientific matter with which to reflect on what unites us with and separates us from the other living beings that share the biosphere with us – as anthropocentrism and its dreams of omnipotence carry on as usual.

The writer, journalist, and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach is one of the most intriguing characters of the first half of the 20th century – a period that witnessed both the best (in art for example) and worst (in politics) of things. She visited Lisbon twice, and she travelled widely in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Africa. Her works reflect the influences of her constant travels around the world. She was an androgynous, freethinking figure who was, despite herself, constantly trying to run away. Her chaotic love life is traced here by Gonçalo Vilas-Boas, who has studied her in depth. Born in Switzerland to a wealthy and influential family, she was educated at top private schools, and there were many doors that were open to her. But her deep inner sense of dissatisfaction ultimately manifested itself through addiction and imbalance. Her brief, tormented life (she died at just thirty-four) was filled with adventure, wars, drugs, suicides and depression; however, it is her charm that will always remain in our memories.

Based on a passage from her interview with French writer Annie Ernaux (awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022) for a magazine in 2021, the Italian novelist, translator and journalist Simonetta Greggio talks about the fundamental contribution of Ernaux’s work and public position in giving names to nameless things, as their existence was denied, hidden or ignored.

In March, in an interview on the conservative American TV channel Fox News, Bethany Mandel – author of the anti-woke book Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation – was asked to define ‘woke’. Hesitatingly, she uttered, ‘So, I mean, woke is, sort of the idea that, umm... I... I mean woke is something that’s very hard to define...’, before finally offering an almost incomprehensible definition: ‘It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally re-imagine and re-do society to create hierarchies of oppression...’. As she herself anticipated, the moment went viral.

This interview with a Portuguese scientist, an internationally renowned immunologist, takes the form of a wide-ranging conversation conducted by Vasco Barreto, a researcher at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. They talk about António Coutinho’s career and the roles he has played in public life, notably as director of the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, and also about theoretical questions relating to the philosophy of science and the scientific process. In addition, they discuss pragmatic issues concerning science policy.

António Franco Alexandre is a leading figure of contemporary Portuguese poetry. His path is solitary, made of inflections and profound variations. From one book to another, we can read the disquiet and the analytical hyperconsciousness that are also the traits of a way of living. His friend and fellow poet Helder Moura Pereira translated his verses expressly for this issue.

The publication of António Franco Alexandre’s collected poems reveals the diversity of his poetry from one book to another, and also shows the author’s stringent formal and thematic poetic standards without being conventionally formalistic or content driven. It is this quality that has earned them pride of place in the field of contemporary Portuguese poetry.

Alireza Taghaboni is one of the most renowned Iranian architects. He lives in the capital of Iran, where he is the author of landmark projects. In his work, he combines the practice of architecture with reflection on the same. He is frequently invited to participate in international conferences and congresses on contemporary architecture. In the essay he has written for Electra, Taghaboni talks about the architecture of Tehran created after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq war. Analysing some architectural and urban examples that he considers to be paradigmatic, he uses the concepts of desire and practice as indicative of what circumstances, events and changes have allowed, prevented or forced to happen.

In a very original text written for the dossier of this edition of Electra, the architect, historian, theorist and critic Mark Wigley, author of a work that is noted for the novelty of the questions it raises and the audacity of its relationships with art, philosophy, culture and technology, speaks of the conceptual attitude of architecture, as a possibility of activity, in the face of idleness. Wigley has been a professor at prestigious universities, such as Princeton and Columbia, in the USA. He has curated exhibitions in several museums, including MoMA in New York, where the landmark exhibition ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’ (with Philip Johnson) was presented. Together with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Booman, in 2005 he founded Volume Magazine.