The Academic and the CivicIASH Research Theme,
September 2009 - August 2012
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Links to: Events associated with the Academic and the Civic Research Theme
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Context Relations between universities and their geographical, cultural and political contexts are a source of enduring concern. The academic and the civic have been regarded as, variously, opposed, inextricable, and mutually complicit. In the New Jersey school system, the Plainfield Academy for 'at-risk students' recently elected to change its name to the 'Barack Obama Academy for Academic and Civic Development.' Across the United States education is being newly described in terms that unite learning and citizenship imperatives; in the United Kingdom, citizenship has become a statutory element in the National Curriculum for Schools. In higher education the 'knowledge transfer' agenda attempts to build new relationships between academics and the 'users' of research. Such initiatives need to be understood within a broader framework which is both historically dense and conceptually sophisticated. Long before the nineteenth-century emergence of the English civic university movement from private institutions led to the foundation of the great city universities of Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield, Scotland had ancient universities embedded in and supported by their city contexts. The University of Edinburgh was founded in 1582; known as the 'tounis college,' it was promoted by the ministers and Town Council. But, as a recent historian has put it, 'A university could be an affliction as well as an asset' to the community that fostered it:
Every university has its own history of 'town and gown' relationships: close, mutually supportive, troubled and antagonistic. At any historical moment and in any particular location, the relationship between the academic and the civic may reveal much about a society's values, anxieties, practical requirements and larger aspirations. IASH has strong connections with some of the great European city universities, including Utrecht, Bologna, Charles University in Prague and Jagellonian University in Krakow. This research theme will address particular aspects of the dialogue between different universities and their civic contexts; comparisons between how relationships have been sustained in different national and cultural contexts and at different points in time; and more conceptual issues around the identification and constitution of learning and research as special activities, and the effect of institutionalising them in centres located in, but set apart from, other aspects of civic life. What did, and do, nations and cities want from their universities and their academics? If in the eighteenth century Edinburgh's town council promoted reform of the University to fit it to provide a modern education for a participant in 'civil society,' it seems now that universities are increasingly urged to provide vocational training and practical innovation to support a business economy. The effects of civic pressures on disciplinary formation and innovation are complex and penetrate well beyond the teaching curricula of universities to re-shape the very idea of 'research' and its value to society. When did the image of the 'ivory tower' emerge to isolate what went on in universities from the life that surrounded their precincts, and to what extent does that image still remain in the minds of citizens? Do academics still retain an aura of cultural authority, and from what is it assumed to derive? In the context of government pressure to demonstrate the 'impact' and 'knowledge exchange' components of university research, we shall investigate the mechanisms by which ideas are generated, transmitted, and 'applied' in extra-academic environments. At its largest, this theme invokes the relationship between social existence and the generation of knowledge. Edinburgh and "English literature", 1762 –2012: academic and civic contexts: Spring 2012 Festival of Politics Event - "Whose heritage - whose society?": 25 August 2011 Voices of Moderatism in the Atlantic World, 1600-2010, 3-4 March 2011 'Global Humanities' and Public Policy "Changing
Relationships: The City and The University", 27 October 2010 Additional events already planned include
Further events will be announced in due course. We welcome suggestions for additional meetings. It is expected that there will be creative interaction with other current IASH themes, in particular Theory in Practice, Practice in Theory and Dialogues of Enlightenment (see also our CHAT series). Applications for Fellowships in relation to any aspect of this theme are invited from researchers in any field of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. See the Fellowships Programme.
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