Juan Manuel Moreno
26 April 2024
Early in February this year, the Edinburg University Press published The Edinburg Companion to the New European Humanities, a collection of essays prepared by colleagues from the ‘new’ and ‘old’ humanities from across Europe.
Edited by Rosi Braidotti, Hiltraud Casper-Hehne, Marjan Ivković, and Daan F. Oostveen, the volume contains two chapters contributed by the Institute for Global Prosperity’s (IGP) Founder and Director Professor Henrietta L. Moore and former IGP Research Fellow Juan M. Moreno: Chapter 8 ‘Changing Patterns of Self-Other Interaction in the Contemporary World’, where we adopt an exploratory case study analysis to study how different forms of artistic performances, aesthetic productions and academic-community collaborations can help us navigate the uncertainties of the contemporary moment by “rethinking and reimagining our relationship to knowledge, developing different forms of engagement, and cultivating opportunities to care for ourselves and others. And Chapter 23 ‘Where Next for the Humanities? Perspectives from Across Europe’, where we bring together a variety of perspectives from a wide range of external contributions made to the volume (and published on the New European Humanities hub site). Purposefully avoiding specific disciplinary demarcations, we highlight points of convergence and disruption to examine the humanities actions and possibilities in the contemporary moment across five emerging and evolving themes: imagination and aesthetics; building bridges; ethics of knowledge production; complex temporalities; and navigating tensions.
It is an ambitious volume and, like many other international projects, putting it together was an industrious exercise of interdisciplinary collaborations not free of epistemological, methodological, and, why not, logistical quarrels. It all started in 2017 when the International Council of Philosophy and the Human Sciences (CISPH), in collaboration with UNESCO, commissioned a World Humanities Report (WHR). But, at that moment, I did not know about the project and I didn’t even know about the Institute for Global Prosperity and its global reaching work. Then, I was working with a humanitarian NGO supporting disaster management operations in the East Caribbean. Another type of humanities. It was not until May 2019 that I met Henrietta and was invited to collaborate in the project. Since May 2019 five years have gone… sometimes feels more like five lives ago.
That original WHR project had set the goal of highlighting the strengths and contributions of the humanities to the many challenges and opportunities facing our society. We struggled. Complex, diverse and differing disciplinary positions and epistemologies led to intense discussions; administrative hurdles arose, and lasted. Within these debates, it did not help that I had initially approached this project with the ‘arts’ in mind as an integral part of the ‘humanities’, something I have been bashed for since as it is ‘disciplinarily’, ‘methodologically’, and ‘epistemically’… incorrect? I remain unwaveringly obstinate (open small bracket – I wonder how ‘humanistic’ is ‘humanitarian’ work – close small bracket).
And then, well, we were confronted with that unprecedented combo of health, social, economic, and existential crises brought by the Covid-19 pandemic and which we all too eagerly wish to forget… but cannot. Many people left too soon, many lost loved ones without being able to say goodbye, and yet many more were left hindered by loss. Loss of all kinds (material, social, emotional, affective). And while no political programme across the world seemed apt to develop sound enough responses that balanced LIFE, CARE, JOY and LIVELIHOODS of most vulnerable people, the sciences of the mind and the heart were unequivocal. The sciences of the mind, when not tergiversated, gave us sound advice while desperately seeking for new fixes (mainly, but not only, vaccines). The sciences of the heart told us, affected us, on what was important, what truly mattered, what was there to rediscover, re-encounter… artistic expressions, games, music, sports, relations, green spaces, companionship, touch… windows and balconies.
As this happened, the European WHR team members, also affected, also confined, locked-down, and faraway from each other, became preoccupied with the immediate logistical repercussions of rescheduling and coordinating hybridised meetings and conferences that mirrored whatever it was we then thought of ‘normalcy’.
But as we struggled, we also thrived. We managed to find the ‘in-betweens’. And yet, though one knows the content of a volume by heart ahead its publication after years of work and revisions, seeing the result is as exhilarating as satisfying. The various contributions of this work bring together transdisciplinary approaches, theoretical speculations, ethical imaginaries, and policy-making pragmatism to cover a wide range of theoretical, philosophical and ontological perspectives and methodologies including: intercultural humanities, post- and decolonial perspectives, feminist post-humanities, digital humanities, artificial intelligence, medical humanities, environmental humanities, humanities and science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and public humanities. The volume also dwells on the threats the humanities, and knowledge in general, face today from chronic underfunding of teaching and research, to risks to intellectual freedom, democracy, critical discourse and diversity, throughout the dystopian narratives posed by political and market forces and organisations.
Five years ago, when we began this work, we were already faced with complex and untangled uncertainties and entering a pandemic. Today, those same uncertainties are coupled with yet more conflicts, loss, and the unknown and yet to-be-unpacked realms of the fourth industrial revolution machine learning and artificial intelligence. And like then, now the Humanities will be most needed to help us navigate our contemporary moment
To find out more about the book and get a copy, visit: https://edinburghuniversitypre...
Juan Manuel Moreno has worked as a research fellow at the Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) at UCL, and at the Values in Sustainability Research Group, at University of Brighton, UK. He currently works as an independent researcher at the Fondation John BOST, France, where his research is focused on mental health, psychosocial rehabilitation strategies, and human rights and liberties of persons experiencing disabilities. Juan Manuel has an interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral background in history, shared cultural values, political science, international migration, community development, global nutrition issues and humanitarian work. His research interests bring together oral history, socio-political analysis, social justice and community resilience. In his spared time, he is a comic illustrator and creator of cartoon ‘matéman’ and author of matéman: Cebada 2018-2020.
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
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