IASH warmly welcomes proposals from Fellows past and present to participate in our 50th Anniversary Symposium at the Playfair Library, Old College, on Thursday 23rd April 2020:
Humanities of the Future: perspectives from the past and present
Our anniversary celebration meeting, to mark fifty years of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, looks back and forward by half a century to understand how the conception and practice of humanities research is developing.
IASH welcomed its first Fellows in 1970 to respond to the possibility that humanities research was changing: becoming more interdisciplinary, more likely to require external funding, and likely to depend on broad international scholarly networks. The Institute was a way to realise these possibilities. IASH is now far larger and more wide-ranging than the initial model ever anticipated; it embraces the arts, law and the social sciences as well as the classical humanities, and welcomes scholars from across the globe.
But the situation of the Institute continues to develop, in part because of new possibilities and themes. Currently, IASH is strongly encouraging work in the digital humanities, calling on emerging methods to carry out and extend customary forms of humanities research and exploring endeavours which are more or less unthinkable without digital connectivity and forms of digital analysis. Many Fellows are working in the area of environmental humanities, re-examining the links between cultural practices and ecological change. Systematic attention to the environment is also part of the widening-out and recognition of diverse perspectives which has been such a key feature of change within the academy in the last fifty years. The humanities are also involved in new conversations with informatics and the natural sciences about the nature and specificity of being human and the ethical and legal innovations that may be required to handle humans’ interventions into human nature.
This celebratory meeting will therefore offer conversations about the trajectory of the humanities, arts and social sciences, and encourage anticipations towards the next fifty years to prepare IASH and the scholarly community for key trends in humanities futures.
The event will feature a keynote by distinguished humanities scholar Professor Rosi Braidotti (University of Utrecht) and contributions from other guests including Fellows present and past.
In this call for papers, we welcome proposals, papers, panels, performances, fictions, films and installations addressing:
- The academy in fifty years – what advances in methodology, publishing, pedagogy and research will we see in the arts, humanities and social sciences? What novel interdisciplinary areas are on the horizon?
- Utopias / dystopias – how do we think about and make the future? What is the role of history and historiography when we envision our futures?
- Medical / veterinary / health humanities – can we speak of comparable STEM humanities?
- Public humanities – how do we interpret and express the impacts that climate change, technology and politics will have on future generations?
- Humanities without humans – what are the limits of the post-human or non-human? What is the role of AI, robotics or cyborgs in the academy?
- Putting the human back into humanities – after the advent of queer studies, feminist theory and the decolonising of the curriculum, what new trends and ‘turns’ will emerge in the next fifty years across the arts, social sciences and humanities?
DEADLINE EXTENDED: To participate, please send a 250-word proposal and 100-word biography to Ben.Fletcher-Watson@ed.ac.uk by 5pm on Friday 30 August 2019.