FORMES is a research group at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) which focuses on questions of form and formalist approaches from an interdisciplinary perspective. 

The group was established at the Maison des Sciences Humaines (MSH), the ULB’s interdisciplinary hub, in 2026. The group will look afresh at the roles of forms: their shaping force; their diverse histories; their contrasting disciplinary applications; and their unconsidered aspects and aporias. To do this, FORMES will organise a series of activities [LINK HERE TO ACTIVITIES]. 

FORMES will focus on four main research strands from 2026-2030:

Strand 1 — Life Forms 

This strand examines the forms that ‘life’ takes on across different disciplinary fields, both as a subject of study and as a normative concept. The social sciences analyse forms of lived experience and governance; architecture gives spatial form to assumptions about human and non-human life; literature gives shape to narrative lives that in turn influence our understanding of our own existences; and philosophy examines the normative, ontological and political status of life itself. 

Strand  2 — Forms of Power 

Forms are integral to the constitution of power. Laws, rules, legal definitions, diplomatic recognition and sovereignty are all forms which do not merely organise pre-existing relationships, but rather establish them, legitimise them and, at times, render them contestable and subject to transformation. Our aim is to understand not only how symbolic forms distribute legitimacy, rendering things visible or admissible, but also to analyse how those forms are inhabited, displaced, or subverted by those seeking to transform their effects.

Strand 3 — Forms of Knowledge

The third research strand understands forms as both conditions of possibility for knowledge and as objects of knowledge in and of themselves. Social science models, legal structures, poetic genres, and digital formats each determine what can be known, by whom, and with what effects. We always think within the forms available to us, which implies that new forms might open up new ways of understanding the world. This research area therefore examines forms of knowledge, the knowledge of forms, and the formal frameworks through which disciplines articulate their epistemic practices.

Strand 4 — Art Forms

This strand examines the forms that structure the production, circulation and reception of artworks across media and traditions. Artforms are dynamic mechanisms that organise sensory experience, functioning as both constraints and guide rails. What a form reveals about itself when it is transgressed, parodied or disrupted (the sonnet under strain, the narrative procedure subverted, the architectural form destabilised) is often every bit as revealing as when it does what it is supposed to.

By bringing together literary studies, art history, aesthetics, musicology, film studies and media theory, this research area fosters a dialogue that is attentive to the specificities of each medium while identifying cross-cutting issues: serial forms, normative genres, the relationship between form and material, and the formal transformations brought about by digital and generative environments.