“It is a wonderful recognition of the work I have done and how it has contributed to the subject’s development. The prize is a compass, and is awarded to people who are regarded as pointing out new directions and new paths,” she says, the day after receiving the award.

Founded philosophy as a subject at Södertörn

Marcia Sá Cavalkante Schuback received her PhD in philosophy in 1992 and started at Södertörn University in 1999, helping establish philosophy as a subject at the university. Her fields of research include phenomenology, hermeneutics, existential philosophy and the links between philosophy and art.

“Recently, I have spent a great deal of time on the philosophy of exile, and questions of the need to reformulate the concept of existence based on the experience of exile. I have also become interested in the new forms of fascism emerging around the world, which I call the fascism of ambiguity,” she says.

During her career, Marcia Sá Cavalkante Schuback has written books and essays in Portuguese, English and Swedish, among others. Her latest book, Ex Brasilis: brev från pandemin [Ex Brasilis: letters from the pandemic], uses nine letters to touch on everything from everyday details to the state of the world. It was written with the support of her daughter, Cecilia Sá Cavalcante Schubach, doctoral student in aesthetics, during enforced isolation in Rio de Janeiro in 2020. The letters are addressed to abstract and strange recipients such as “the human” or “the home”, as if Brazil is sending letters in a bottle to unknown recipients in the Nordics.

“The letters are about how the pandemic has shown us the world’s mutated state, humanity’s helplessness when faced with its mutated reality, what the world expects of us,” she says.

International association

The Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle is comprised of leading researchers in the field of continental philosophy, from the US, China, Japan and Europe. What unites them is the branch of philosophy that has been influenced by European philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as in phenomenology and existentialism. They also want to compare European philosophy with ideas from Japanese, Chinese and South American concepts and ideas.

Jury citation

Bestowed in recognition of pointing the way to a more inclusive and compassionate world and for a career promoting philosophy in its global diversity.