The New Humanities in the ‘Post-University’

In States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century, the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler asserted that, irrespective of the historical period to which it belongs, the educational system has a unique vocation: forming ‘a type of attention’ that was initially called logos and, later on, reason. The university has the mission of forming this type of attention and also, as Mark Taylor pointed out in Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities, ‘a responsibility to serve the greater social good’: to cultivate ‘informed citizens who are aware of and open to different cultural perspectives and are willing to engage in reasonable debate about critical issues.’

According to Stiegler, in the twenty-first century ‘logos has become a technologos’ and our societies increasingly profit-driven, two joint tendencies which had also a significant impact on the reorganization of the University as a corporate commodified workplace representative of the ‘capitalocene’. In order to respond to the challenges of the allegedly posthuman digital age, humanities have also mutated into ‘new humanities’ or ‘posthumanities’ whose role, beyond adapting to and engaging with new ways of life, should be to remain vigilant and critical of the marketization of higher education.

Set squarely in the age of technology and technomania that enslave contemporary homo technicus through tele-technologies, this anniversary issue will look into the pragmatic search for socio-political, cultural and educational remedies that must be put forward from within an institution under threat. Taking into account (among others) Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins, Thomas Docherty’s For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution, Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Stefan Collini’s What Are Universities For?, Jacques Derrida’s ‘The University without Condition’ (in Without Alibi) and rejecting the already hackneyed idea that the Humanities are in a crisis, this issue will enquire more positively into what role they can acquire within the academic institution still called ‘University’ in the 21st century.

We invite contributions related, but not limited to, the following:

- new humanities and new disciplines in the humanities in the 21st century

- the development of ‘posthumanities’ as critical and disciplinary reflections on the posthuman

- ‘remedial humanities’

- humanities and techno-science or tele-technologies

- AI and the new humanities

- digital humanities now and in the future

- the role of media technologies in the university

- the impact of international rankings on academia

We welcome interdisciplinary approaches, ranging across critical theory, literary and cultural studies, linguistics, as well as other disciplines in the humanities and the sciences. Contributors are advised to follow the journal’s submission guidelines and stylesheet, which can be downloaded from the journal’s website at http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/. The deadline for abstract submission is March 30, 2020. Please send 500-word proposals to the journal editors, who will answer any queries you may have. Articles selected for publication must be submitted by April 30, 2020. All submitted articles will be blind-refereed except when invited. Accepted articles will be returned for post-review revisions by June 30, 2020, and will be expected back in their final version by September 30, 2020 at the latest.

Proposals and articles should be sent as attachments to wordandtext2011@gmail.com and to the editors to anionescu@sjtu.edu.cn and milesi@sjtu.edu.cn.