Thinking the contemporary

This article seeks to recalibrate current debates about the value of the humanities by shifting their focus away from notions of the ‘distinctiveness’ of the humanities. Rather than defining the humanities by demarcating their disciplinary boundaries, it suggests that it might be more productive to see them as nodes of networks of intellectual and social practices. The article considers teaching as such a networked intellectual and social practice, before theorising such perspectives via Foucault’s and Badiou’s notion of the ‘contemporary’. The article concludes by turning its attention back to the practice of teaching, approached via the ‘abolition of the English Department’ proclaimed by Ngũgĩ, Owuor Anyumba and lo Liong in Nairobi in 1969

Aesthetics · Digital humanities · Discipline · Epistemology · Humanities · Media studies · Optimal distinctiveness theory · Social science · Sociology · Digital Games and Media · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Literacy, Media, and Education · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology