Why Humanities? The Decline and Fall of the Role of Human Sciences in the Euro-Atlantic World
Brno, Czech Republic
Organization: Masaryk University
The goal of this conference is to analyze and describe the mechanisms at work in the last 120 years which led to a comprehensive and global decline of the role of the humanities, especially in Europe and the US. It will be divided into two panels: the first of them, titled “Humanities, Sciences and Politics 1901–1991: Building the Divide” addresses the historiographical time when the process of marginalization was initiated. We seek contributions analyzing the global workings at play and the individual decisions (by scholars, institutions, politicians, economical actors...) behind the progressive, but extremely efficient, suppression of the space for human sciences within societies.
The second panel, “Capitalization of Research, Academic Colonialism, and PR Denigration: Welcome to 21st Century Academia”, bridges historical time until today. In this second part, we seek engaged interventions which openly question the current mechanisms which marginalize and control the humanities. At the same time, we want to address the self-colonial syndrome of scholars in the humanities themselves, often collaborating openly with a system made to subdue them without questioning it anymore. We are interested in papers questioning the capitalistic strategies of the main publishing houses, predatory attitudes to research results, issues of “academic colonialism,” such as peer-review practices excluding selected topics and scholars from non-Euro-Atlantic institutions (e.g. the Global South, Eastern Europe etc.), monolinguistic normalization, the loss of diversity in topics, and the ways in which politics and media are openly denigrating the agency of human sciences.
The workshop will be held at Masaryk University in Brno from October 30 to November 1, 2024. The organization will cover the costs of accommodation and meals, and at least part of the travel expenses (depending on actual costs). This conference is conducted within the framework of the project “Ready for the future: understanding the long-term resilience of human culture” (RES-HUM) (CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004593).
Researchers wishing to contribute are invited to send their proposal, including a title, an abstract (about 200 words) and a short biography (all in one single pdf file), to adrien.palladino@phil.muni.cz by May 1, 2024.
Adrien Palladino