Reimagining The Humanities

Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies. Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field. Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim—Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote “literary justice” in Los Angeles.

Volume 1: Theories, Methods and Ideas explores the mobility of ideas through time and space and how interdisciplinary theories and methodological approaches used in mobilities studies can be profitably utilised within the humanities and social sciences. Through a series of short chapters, mobility is employed as an elastic, inclusive and multifaceted concept across various disciplines to shed light on a geographically and chronologically broad range of issues and case studies. In doing so, the concept of mobility is positioned as a powerful catalyst for historical change and as a fruitful approach to research in the humanities and social sciences. Like its sister volume, this volume is edited and written by members of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities (MoHu) at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and The Ancient World (DiSSGeA) of the University of Padua, Italy. The structure of the book mirrors the Theories and Methods, and Ideas thematic research clusters of the Centre. Afterwords from leading scholars from other institutions synthesise and reflect upon the findings of each section. This volume, together with Volume 2: Objects, People and Texts, makes a compelling case for the use of mobility studies as a research framework in the humanities and social sciences. As such, it will be of interest to students and researchers in various disciplines.

This edited volume reconsiders the importance of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a post-Cold War perspective. It has been argued that during the Cold War era scholarship was limited by the anxiety that authors felt about the possibility of a global thermonuclear war, and the role their scholarship could play in obstructing such an event. The new scholarship of Nuclear Humanities approaches this history and its fallout with both more nuanced and integrative inquiries, paving the way towards a deeper integration of these seminal events beyond issues of policy and ethics. This volume, therefore, offers a distinctly post-Cold War perspective on the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The chapters collected here address the memorialization and commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by officials and states, but also ordinary people’s resentment, suffering, or forgiveness. The volume presents a variety of approaches with contributions from academics and contributions from authors who are strongly connected to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its people. In addition, the work branches out beyond the traditional subjects of social sciences and humanities to include contributions on art, photography, and design. This variety of approaches and perspectives provides moral and political insights on the full range of vulnerabilities – such as emotional, bodily, cognitive, and ecological – that pertains to nuclear harm. This book will be of much interest to students of critical war studies, nuclear weapons, World War II history, Asian History and International Relations in general.

Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative--not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project--not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn't cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.

Sparking a long-overdue debate about the future of American education, "The Marketplace of Ideas" examines traditional university institutions, assessing what is worth saving and what is not

Modernization and digital globalization have proven to mark major thresholds where paradigmatic shifts and realignments take place. This volume aims to capture the reconfiguration of humanistic study between the forces of global integration and cultural diversification from a full range of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. The key issue is discussed in three major parts. The first chapter examines transnational interpolations of the humanities as potential indicator for a globalizing humanistic research. The second chapter deals with humanistic revisions of modernity with and against globality. The third chapter discusses the ambiguous constitution of cultural diversity as a complement and counter-movement to global integration, ideologically moving between social cohesion and exclusion. The final chapter outlines what the threshold-crossing from modern to global humanities will mean for the future of humanistic research. The multidisciplinary study of culture within the history of the humanities documents and reflects the mobility and migration of its concepts and methods, moving and translating between disciplines, research traditions, historical periods, academic institutions, and the public sphere.

Volume 2: Objects, People and Texts explores the movement of individuals and peoples and the circulation of material objects and books and texts. Through a series of short chapters, mobility is employed as an elastic, inclusive and multifaceted concept across various disciplines to shed light on a geographically and chronologically broad range of issues and case studies. In doing so, the concept of mobility is positioned as a powerful catalyst for historical change and as a fruitful approach to research in the humanities and social sciences. Like its sister volume, this volume is edited and written by members of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities (MoHu) at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and The Ancient World (DiSSGeA) of the University of Padua, Italy. The structure of the book mirrors the Theories and Methods, and Ideas thematic research clusters of the Centre. Afterwords from leading scholars from other institutions synthesise and reflect upon the findings of each section. This volume, together with Volume 1: Theories, Methods and Ideas, makes a compelling case for the use of mobility studies as a research framework in the humanities and social sciences. As such, it will be of interest to students and researchers in various disciplines.