Challenging (the) Humanities

15-16 November 2012, University of Western Sydney (Parramatta)

The humanities, in Australia and internationally, are currently presented with a rare combination of challenges. These include changing policy environments and priorities; the issues posed by contemporary debates concerning climate change, sustainable development and the financial crisis leading to new forms of engagement with the natural and physical sciences, and with economics; to more general changes in the prevailing intellectual environment with an increasing emphasis on the role played by material forces – technologies and infrastructures – in organising social life; cross-disciplinary concerns with the role of non-human actors; and by new conceptions of the human associated with the perspective of the anthropocene.

The humanities have, in their turn, responded vigorously to these changing contexts. They have proved a stimulus to intellectual innovation in many humanities disciplines, and to new conceptions of their relations to other disciplines, leading to significant challenges to purely scientific, technocratic or economistic framings of policy challenges and solutions. The increasingly prominent role of Indigenous perspectives in Australian intellectual life has also prompted widespread recognition of the relevance of Indigenous knowledges to contemporary social, cultural and political questions. Humanities scholarship has brought new light to bear on the ways in which the human is always shaped by its relations to the nonhuman in its environmental, technical and animal forms.

The 43^rd Annual Symposium of the Academy will debate the contemporary challenges that face the humanities and the challenging responses that these have elicited.

Programme                               

For further information, please contact Gabriela Cabral on Tel: 02 6125 9860 or at gabriela.cabral@humanities.org.au