Theme 1: Critical Cultural Studies

Exploring ways to broaden the scope of the humanities and creating a wider critical canvas through cultural studies. Examining critical perspectives on academic disciplines; how traditional disciplines remain constant or must respond to changes in humans’ relationships to each other, to society, technology, and the environment. Considering ways of knowing, shifts in conceptual frameworks and research methodologies. Proposing new directions for humanities studies.

  • Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary humanities
  • The relationship of humanities to other knowledge domains (technology, science, economics)
  • Making knowledge: research in the humanities
  • Subjectivity and objectivity, truth and relativity
  • Philosophy, consciousness and the meanings of meaning
  • Geographical and archeological perspectives on human place and movement
  • The study of humans and humanity, past and present
  • The future of humanities

Theme 2: Communication and Linguistics Studies

Examining the forms and effects of human representation and communication.

  • Human representations and expression through art, media, technology, design
  • Communications in human interactions
  • Linguistic and cultural diversity: its nature and meanings
  • Language dynamics: global English, multilingualism, language death, language revival
  • New media, new messages, new meanings in the “information society”

Theme 3: Literary Humanities

Analyses of literatures and literary practices, to stabilize bodies of work in traditions and genres, or to unsettle received expressive forms and cultural contents. Examining changes over time in conceptual frameworks, ways of knowing, and ways of seeing.

  • Critique in literary analysis; the role of the critic; perspectives on criticism
  • Conceptual frameworks (modern, postmodern, neo-liberal, colonialism, post-colonialism, etc)
  • Literatures: national, global and diasporic
  • Literary forms (fiction, the novel, poetry, theater, non-fiction) and genres
  • Literary forms of media: photography, film, video, internet
  • Identity and difference in literature

Theme 4: Civic, Political, and Community Studies

Social studies in the humanities, where the humanities meet the ‘social sciences’. Affinities and affiliations and their impacts on relationships within and across cultures. Issues of policy, governance, and controls over populations within and across nations. The human condition in an era of globalization.

  • Human formations: families, institutions, organizations, states and societies
  • Human expressions: values, attitudes, dispositions, sensibilities
  • Human differences: gender, sexuality, families, race, ethnicity, class, (dis)ability
  • Affinities: citizenship and other forms of belonging
  • Globalization and its discontents
  • Diversity: dialogue as a local and global imperative
  • The dynamics of identity in culture
  • Immigration, refugees, minorities and diaspora
  • Internationalism, globalism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism
  • Human rights
  • Human violence and peace
  • Governance and politics in society

Theme 5: Humanities Education

On theories and practices of teaching and learning in the disciplines of the humanities and humanistic social sciences. General and subject-specific pedagogy.

  • General and subject-specific pedagogy
  • Language acquisition and language instruction
  • Learning new languages (including second language instruction, multilingual)
  • Professional development and teacher education
  • Influence of learner characteristics on the educational process
  • Education for a new humanity