Prof. Moreno-Caballud investigates the social construction of meaning during the 20 th and 21 st centuries in Spain, paying special attention to the power of literary and cinematographic interventions to question and redraw the limits of what is perceived as possible in the social sphere.
His research focuses on the cultural transformations brought by processes of capitalist modernization and neoliberal crisis in Spain. In his edited work La imaginación sostenible: culturas y crisis económica en la España actual (2012), a special monographic issue of the journal Hispanic Review, he argues that the Spanish cultural scene has pioneered practices of sharing and collaborating that are playing an important role as alternatives to the ethos of individualism and competition responsible for to the current crisis. This is also the subject of his book-length project titled El retorno de lo común. Culturas colaborativas y crisis económica en la España del siglo XXI, which explores how the “return of the commons” currently being lived out in Spanish social and cultural spheres responds to the economic crisis by bringing together self-organizing and sustainability techniques (such as crowdfunding and distributed collaboration), with aesthetic practices (e.g. audiovisual remixing and collective storytelling), as well as ethical attitudes (openness to others, respect for vulnerability, etc).
In a further line of research, he focuses on the cultural legacy of rural Spain after the transformation of the country into a modern, consumerist, and urban-centered society. He has published papers engaging these and other subjects in academic journals such as Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, and Siglo XXI: Literatura y Cultura Españolas. He has also published articles about the current Spanish crisis and the “indignados” movement in several newspapers.
Penn Spanish