Abstract
I would like to use this final Editorial for this volume of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education to share a call for contributors for a new book being edited by myself and a distinguished colleague, Professor Jon Nixon (The Education University of Hong Kong).
The provisional title of this book is: The Humanities in Post-Enlightenment and Global Europe
As the title suggests, we are looking for contributions which will form part of our project to revisit the idea of the humanities in context of a post-enlightenment and global Europe.
Preliminary outline of focus and structure
‘The humanities’ has become an increasingly porous and amorphous category. This is partly because of the development of new disciplines and fields of study that cross the epistemological boundaries of humanistic and scientific inquiry and partly because the globalisation of knowledge is increasingly blurring these boundaries. This book is primarily concerned with how the idea of ‘the humanities’ – and the practices and traditions with which that idea is associated – are to be sustained and developed within an increasingly globalised Europe. The emphasis within and across chapters is on the role of higher education in articulating and re-interpreting the idea of ‘the humanities’ for the mid-21st Century.
The volume will be (provisionally) structured along the following lines:
I. Practices and traditions (3–4 chapters)
How are we to define ‘the humanities’ both as an academic category and as a way of life embedded in ongoing practices and traditions?
Key themes: friendship; ‘Bildung’; the idea of ‘the examined life’; the centrality of language; etc. II. Critical perspectives (3–4 chapters)
How might critiques of ‘the humanities’ contribute to the development of humanistic study and practice? How do these critiques impact upon higher education?
Key themes: critical theory; feminist critiques; post-Marxist interpretations; post-colonial critiques; etc. III. Critical cases (3–4 chapters)
How are ‘the humanities’ being developed creatively within particular contexts of teaching and learning?
Key themes: interdisciplinary and inter-professional contexts; marginalised contexts (e.g. refugee camps); virtual contexts; etc. IV. Challenges and possibilities (3–4 chapters)
How can ‘the humanities’ face the challenges of the 21st Century?
Key themes: confronting post-truth politics; ecological/holistic imaginaries; the challenges of automation; etc.
Process issues
It would be helpful if abstracts could be limited to 250 words and provide a succinct outline of the argument and structure of the proposed chapter as these relate to the above structure and thematic. Abstracts should be accompanied by a 100-word biographical paragraph (institutional affiliation, relevant publications, etc.)
In the first instance, we would like to receive abstracts by: 1 February 2019.
Please submit to Jan McArthur at: