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Current Conferences

FIRST INIT Virtual Seminar: Inter- and Transdisciplinary Horizons. INIT Purposes and Approaches
Opening date : Jan 26 2012 00:00 UTC
Closing date : Feb 28 2013 00:00 UTC

The challenge is clear.  Understanding and acting on pressing issues of cultural and environmental survival—from  explaining global migration, to pushing the boundaries of new media art and developing sustainable cities—demand rigorous, relevant and engaged forms of scholarship.  As a result, they also call for a profound re-examination of the nature of academic knowledge production and its role in advancing collective understanding and global wellbeing.  How does one discern the relative relevance of problems for study?  In what ways do disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge production leverage our understanding and capacity to act?  How have individuals and groups attempted to integrate distinct knowledge traditions and worldviews for the advancement of understanding?  What challenges—epistemological, conceptual, empirical, relational, material—do these forms of knowledge production present? How might knowledge production be organized in the future?  How are we to educate individuals to conduct relevant, rigorous and engaged knowledge work?

 

The Inter-transdiscipinary horizons seminar brings together experts in the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, technology, and education to reflect about contemporary forms of academic knowledge production.  With a focus on disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship, the seminar will shed light on the purposes that these approaches might best serve, the processes and practices by which understanding is advanced and validated, the leveraging contributions and challenges that these approaches presents, and resulting implications for research evaluation and education.  It is our hope that a comparative analysis of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to research and education will yield elements toward a comprehensive conceptualization of academic knowledge production—one that articulates, for example, the circumstances under which particular approaches are best fit, the distinct validation challenges they face, and the assumptions about the nature of knowledge and inquiry on which they are built.

The seminar is organized as a virtual platform of conversation and echange of ideas for the INIT network: International Network for Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplnarity

Predictions for International Security: The Knowledge Practice Enigma
Opening date : Jan 26 2012 00:00 UTC
Closing date : Dec 31 2012 00:00 UTC

This conference will bring scholars from different disciplines - political science and international relations, sociology, history, economics, demography and philosophy - into a discussion on the nature of predictions in international security. It will address the following questions. How are claims about the future made in international security, a professional realm that is obsessed with knowing the future? How are these claims “sold” on the public marketplace of ideas? Is anticipating the future about anticipating change?

Global Humanities
Opening date : Apr 4 2011 00:00 UTC
Closing date : May 31 2012 00:00 UTC

What happens to humanities in a global world? At a first glance, "global" and "humanities" seem contradictory in terms. Indeed, humanities have emerged in a national and local setting. Their development has paralleled the birth and the strenghtening of the nation state. This conference brings into a discussion philosophers and social scientists that will address the following questions. To what extent the very concept of humanities is affected by the dynamics of globalization? What role  institutions such as universities play in this context? Are we witnessing the multipolarization of culture? The specialization of knowledge has created divides between and within disciplines. As knowledge crosses national borders, will this dynamic put into question those disciplinary divides? Will it create new disciplines and new approaches? In what way can we imagine a new role for the humanities in a global world? Has the notion of "humanity" changed because of the globalization of culture and knowledge? What are the cultural, ethical or legal innovations that would testify for such a change?

The conference will take place through the Web starting from June 2011. A kick-off meeting with some of the participants has taken place in New York, on May 27th at the Italian Cultural Institute, 686 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065. Tel: 1 212 879 4242;
fax: 1 212 861 4018; email: iicnewyork@esteri.it

Please, register on the website to take part into the virtual debate.

Recent Comments

by Colonomos, Jul 3 2011 18:04 UTC

you are raising a very important point, Hady. as I was telling Shehzad, norms and interests are embedded and evolve in process. this evolution can be positive or negative, and in most cases, it can be both. the example of the laws of war you gave is a very interesting one. you are right by saying that international law and to some extent international ethics - and certainly the just war tradition - have given more latitude to Western states that go to war. in a democratic setting, there is a need to give legitimacy to your decision, this framework is very instrumental from this perspective. so, this would be a negative effect of the use of norms / ethics. however, one must also see the other side of the coin. the alternative to the use of drones - unmanned vehicles that target individuals - is aerial bombing and as, in the past (ie until Korea / Vietnam), undiscriminate bombing, the most dramatic examples are from WW2, from both sides. compare the number of civilians killed by the Britts and the Americans during WW2 and the number of civilians that those states kill today when they fight (millions in many cases killed intentionnally / thousands as a rule unintentionnally). so norms do orient interests, that is the representation of what is appropriate to do (contingent) orient the way you define your interest in a conflict, hence now new tactics and strategy, that focus on precision instead of total destruction. so counterfactually, had we not see those norms develop, Western wars would have fought less wars, for ex. there would have been no interventions such as Kosovo, or maybe Libya more recently (and, true, many who emphasize the role of interest in determining decision by saying that decisions are interest driven only, and, normatively, decisions should be interest driven, have stood againt those wars), but the ones they would have fought (Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon) would have been much bloodier. of course, game theorists would not agree with this kind of analysis because it questions their paradigm, yet they would have to explain decisions to intervene that do not fit with their paradigm. so let's give the humanities a chance, even if we cannot anticipate the consequences of their use.
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