This book is open access under a CC BY license. The first of its kind, this Open Access 'Report' is a first step in assessing the state of the humanities worldwide. Based on an extensive literature review and enlightening interviews the book discusses the value of the humanities, the nature of humanities research and the relation between humanities and politics, amongst other issues.
This book is open access under a CC BY license. The first of its kind, this Open Access 'Report' is a first step in assessing the state of the humanities worldwide. Based on an extensive literature review and enlightening interviews the book discusses the value of the humanities, the nature of humanities research and the relation between humanities and politics, amongst other issues.
The case studies in this book illuminate how arts and humanities tropes can aid in contextualizing Digital Arts and Humanities, Neogeographic and Social Media activity and data through the creation interpretive schemas to study interactions between visualizations, language, human behaviour, time and place.
Modernization and digital globalization have proven to mark major thresholds where paradigmatic shifts and realignments take place. This volume aims to capture the reconfiguration of humanistic study between the forces of global integration and cultural diversification from a full range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. The key issue is discussed in three major parts. The first chapter examines transnational interpolations of the humanities as potential indicator for a globalizing humanistic research. The second chapter deals with humanistic revisions of modernity with and against globality. The third chapter discusses the ambiguous constitution of cultural diversity as a complement and counter-movement to global integration, ideologically moving between social cohesion and exclusion. The final chapter outlines what the threshold-crossing from modern to global humanities will mean for the future of humanistic research. The multidisciplinary study of culture within the history of the humanities documents and reflects the mobility and migration of its concepts and methods, moving and translating between disciplines, research traditions, historical periods, academic institutions, and the public sphere.
What are the humanities? As the cluster of disciplines historically grouped together as “humanities” has grown and diversified to include media studies and digital studies alongside philosophy, art history and musicology to name a few, the need to clearly define the field is pertinent. Herman Paul leads a stellar line-up of esteemed and early-career scholars to provide an overview of the themes, questions and methods that are central to current research on the history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century humanities. This exciting addition to the successful Writing History series will draw from a wide range of case-studies from diverse fields, as classical philology, art history, and Biblical studies, to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the field. In doing so, this ground-breaking book challenges the rigid distinctions between disciplines and show the variety of prisms through which historians of the humanities study the past.
The Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities explores the digital methods and tools scholars use to observe, interpret, and manage nature in several different academic fields. Employing historical, philosophical, linguistic, literary, and cultural lenses, this handbook explores how the digital environmental humanities (DEH), as an emerging field, recognises its convergence with the environmental humanities. As such, it is empirically, critically, and ethically engaged in exploring digitally mediated, visualised, and parsed framings of past, present, and future environments, landscapes, and cultures. Currently, humanities, geographical, cartographical, informatic, and computing disciplines are finding a common space in the DEH and are bringing the use of digital applications, coding, and software into league with literary and cultural studies and the visual, film, and performing arts. In doing so, the DEH facilitates transdisciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, gaming, bioinformatics and linguistics, social media, literature and history, music, painting, philology, philosophy, and the earth and environmental sciences. This handbook will be essential reading for those interested in the use of digital tools in the study of the environment from a wide range of disciplines and for those working in the environmental humanities more generally.
How are different concepts of nature and time embedded into human practices of landscape and environmental management? And how can temporalities that entwine past, present and future help us deal with challenges on the ground? In a time of uncertainty and climate change, how much can we hold onto ideals of nature rooted in a pristine and stable past? The Scandinavian and Australian perspectives in this book throw fresh light on these questions and explore new possibilities and challenges in uncertain and changing landscapes of the future. This book presents examples from farmers, gardens and Indigenous communities, among others, and shows that many people and communities are already actively engaging with environmental change and uncertainty. The book is structured around four themes; environmental futures, mobile natures, indigenous and colonial legacies, heritage and management. Part I includes important contributions towards contemporary environmental management debates, yet the chapters in this section also show how the legacy of older landscapes forms part of the active production of future ones. Part II examines the challenges of living with mobile natures, as it is acknowledged that environments, natures and people do not stand still. An important dimension of the heritage and contemporary politics of Australia, Sweden and Norway is the presence of indigenous peoples. As is clear in part III, the legacies of the colonial past both haunt and energise contemporary land management decisions. Finally, part IV demonstrates how the history and heritage of landscapes, including human activities in those landscapes, are entwined with contemporary environmental management. The rich empirical content of the chapters exposes the diversity of meanings, practices, and ways of being in nature that can be derived from cultural environmental research in different disciplines. The everyday engagements between people, nature and temporalities provide important creative resources with which to meet future challenges.
This book explores some of the major forces and changes in higher education across the world between 1945 and 2015. This includes the explosions of higher education institutions and enrollments, a development captured by the notion of massification. There were also profound shifts in the financing and economic role of higher education reflected in the processes of privatization of universities and curricula realignments to meet the shifting demands of the economy. Moreover, the systems of knowledge production, organization, dissemination, and consumption, as well as the disciplinary architecture of knowledge underwent significant changes. Internationalization emerged as one of the defining features of higher education, which engendered new modes, rationales, and practices of collaboration, competition, comparison, and commercialization. External and internal pressures for accountability and higher education’s value proposition intensified, which fuelled struggles over access, affordability, relevance, and outcomes that found expression in the quality assurance movement.
This book presents an extensive analysis of the multifaceted benefits that higher education in the humanities offers individuals and society, as explored in the context of Hong Kong. Using both quantitative graduate employment survey data and qualitative data from interviews with past humanities graduates and with leading humanities scholars, the study provides an objective picture of the “value” of humanities degrees in relation to the economic needs and growth of Hong Kong, together with an in-depth exploration of their value and use in the eyes of humanities graduates and practitioners. Therefore, although it is hardly the only book on the value and status quo of the humanities worldwide, it nonetheless stands out in this crowded field as one of the very few extended studies that draws on empirical data. The book will appeal to both an academic and a wider audience, including members of the general public, non-academic educators, and government administrators interested in the status quo of humanities education, whether in Hong Kong or elsewhere. The report also includes a wealth of text taken directly from interviews with humanities graduates, who share their compelling life stories and views on the value of their humanities education.
A collective project arising from a dynamic configuration of research concerned with systematic, critical and reflexive inquiry into the normative frames, institutional workings and lived realities of research, this dexterously-crafted Handbook acts as a working guide to the rapidly-evolving interdisciplinary field of meta-research. Bringing together cutting-edge multidisciplinary scholarship, it expertly outlines key domains including the public value, policy and governance of research, knowledge dynamics, and research cultures and careers. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.
