Translation Research Projects 4 (2012) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Deep Education: Assigning a Moral Role to Academic Work
Tochon, F. V. (2011). Deep Education: Assigning a Moral Role to Academic Work. Educaçao, Sociedade & Culturas (Education, Society and Cultures - University of Porto, Portugal), 33, 17-35., 2011
Unless we act to reconceptualize and rebuild the social contract on new bases, postindustrial trends might break it down. Intellectuals who work in the academia should have a special role in this respect. Environmentally, socially, humanely and symbolically disempowering and destructive policies are being imposed in conjunction with financial interests propelled by the myth of productivity. Civil rights are being replaced by surveillance and control. This appalling situation legitimates new reflections on education in order to envision what could and should be done. The old logic of Right and Left inherited from the French Revolution must be altered into a politics of the human if we are to address the risks that financial monopolies have created. The demonstration in this article is that Education – and academic work in particular – must be reconceptualized in a transdisciplinary way that helps solve the destructive problems that humanity faces. The essay reflects on the notion of caring and the development of non-foundational foundations with such core values as biocosmopolitanism and deliberate «décroissance» (postdevelopmental powerdown), in the search for integrated wisdom and science with a conscience.
How interdependent are the sciences and humanities? In this article I trace, in broad terms, a scientifically-grounded narrative that culminates in a world we describe using the humanities, and my field, literary studies, in particular. The longstanding presumption that science sits opposed to the humanities is fostered on both sides, to neither's benefit. I hope that by describing something of the bilateral relationship between these fields, arguing that they may be points on a web rather than discrete disciplines, we might better appreciate their places in a cultural ecosystem of interdependence. My hope is that scholars in both the sciences and the humanities appreciate better what one offers the other. Several scholars have pondered upon the role of the humanities recently. Helen Small reviewed arguments that arose in the nineteenth century from Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, via John Stuart Mill, and from Matthew Arnold, among others. Jonathan Bate's collection of essays by various humanities scholars perhaps shows even more awareness of the pressure on the academy to justify its receipt of public funds, again on cost-benefit principles. Stefan Collini (What Are Universities For?) and Martha Nussbaum have weighed in on similar terms. My own position is largely sympathetic to all of these: Small's is a historically well-informed discussion of the kinds of value that may not be pecuniary, but which are socially significant nonetheless; Nussbaum repudiates the demand for economic value in and of itself, though this may be preaching to the choir, rather than those actually in charge of funding the choir; Bate's various essayists are likewise persuasive, but many of their essays read to me like research proposals to funding bodies, anxious to trumpet past financial returns from research into archaeology, classical studies and theology, with the promise of more if funding continues (the principal object of gratitude in that volume's acknowledgements is the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council). Unlike the essayists in Bate's collection, I do not feel I can make much of a case for enhanced, or even continued, public funding. But if their arguments rest on the observation that the benefits of humanities research are often entirely unpredictable at the point of departure – which I would observe is also true of some of the most significant scientific research – then highlighting some of the unexpected consequences of language as an adaptive characteristic, challenging some of the ways that language is routinely taken for granted in our disciplines, might raise the idea of its value more widely, validating its continued study as a driver towards social good. This article emerges from discussions I have had over the years with English students at Cambridge, recounting their experiences of the flurry of introductions that constitute Freshers' Week, where they so often face demands from students taking STEM subjects to justify the academic value of English. After an exhausting series of evenings being tormented by, say, one of the new intake of engineers, who has pointed out that the raw study of poetry has little saleable value in the marketplace, that all degrees encourage critical thinking and how to write; that they read books too, only in their leisure time, after they have finished their studies – at this point I propose to my weary students that they abandon the defensive mode and strike up a stealth attack, beginning with a question – " You've heard of Charles Darwin? " (Because if my English students are going to be patronized, they may as well give a taste of it back.) Anyway,
The Promise and the Lie of Humanities
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2017
The rising regime of technocracy has generated a slew of self-appraisal on the role of Humanities in the contemporary world, and especially in the institutional location of University. The location of the university is not placed absolutely within the premises of learning but has from the colonial times imbricated itself with the question of social and economic mobility. The university in the postcolonial India continues to be a site of allocation of resources and as such is overdetermined by questions other than the purely academic. This paper delineates the twin concerns for Humanities in India and argues for Humanities which will creatively amalgamate the two concerns that have been worrying it in India-that of the rise of technocracy, and that of a non-complementarity between learner aspirations and institutional requirements. Towards this, the paper advocates on stressing the mutuality of the experience of modernity, thus stressing simultaneity over historicity.
Utopia and Its New Enemies: Intellectuals, Elitism, and the Commonwealth of Learning
Anti-intellectualism is fashionable among intellectuals today as a means of disavowing “elitism.” Such positions typically fail to distinguish, however, between privilege as a personal attribute and a structural one. They imply that desirable social leveling is achieved by asserting “equality,” or by denying the existence of any “transcendent” position from which social orders can be judged. This essay argues instead that no true social equality is possible without universalizing material condi- tions of intellectual life—a position anticipated by Thomas More’s Utopia, where all citizens are educated alike, but also fed, clothed, housed, and nurtured according to their needs, and—crucially—accorded equal access to the leisure that examined life requires. At the same time, More’s text recognizes the difficulty of imagining the details of utopian social order in a “corrupt” present through the contradiction between the “ordered” life of the Utopians and the “liberty” that Hythloday associates with philosophy. This unresolved contradiction insists that we understand Utopia as praxis rather than goal. Utopia’s content argues that total material social transformation is required to achieve equality, but its ironic form cautions us to approach such transformation dialectically—moving from a world of privileged collectives to a world of common—universal—“privilege.”