The Edinburgh Companion to the New European Humanities - by Rosi Braidotti & Hiltraud Casper-Hehne & Marjan Ivkovic & Daan F Oostveen (Hardcover)

About the Book

Assesses the rise of the 'New' Humanities alongside the traditional disciplines and inter-disciplinary 'studies' areas, stressing the positive impact of the Humanities and confronting the threats facing them today.

Book Synopsis

This is the first collection that highlights the strengths and contributions of the Humanities, in the European region. The volume stresses the positive and multidimensional impact of the Humanities on core areas of human experience, and their ability to formulate new frames to represent our collective and individual relation to the world. Further, it explores new ethical social imaginaries, gendered scenarios and spaces of decolonial transculturality.
This collection also confronts the threats the Humanities face today and proposes ways to respond. These threats include public discourses that question the value of the Humanities; the chronic underfunding of teaching and research at our universities and institutions, and the more fundamental risks to intellectual freedom, democracy and critical discourse, diversity, and the radical imagination posed by political and market forces and organisations.
Overall, this volume proposes innovative tools to increase our collective awareness of forms of injustice, exclusion and the suffering of both the human and the non-human inhabitants of this planet. It discusses the posthuman future of the Humanities and makes recommendations for the implementation of innovative approaches to the Humanities.

From the Back Cover

This interdisciplinary reference work is a substantive contribution to the contemporary humanities and offers a navigational tool to reflect the value and relevance of the humanities to knowledge and society, with a special focus on the European region at large. The future-oriented approach of the contributors highlights the positive and multidimensional impact of the humanities on core areas of human experience. New ethical social imaginaries, gendered scenarios and spaces of decolonial transculturality are explored. They propose innovative tools to increase collective awareness of forms of injustice, exclusion, and the suffering of both the human and the non-human inhabitants of this planet. The result is a comprehensive overview of the way in which the humanities is currently transforming from the inside while responding to major political challenges of the 21st century. Key features: - Offers a timely map of important trends written by internationally grounded experts - Presents emerging key sub-areas of the humanities including digital humanities, intercultural humanities, environmental humanities and medical humanities - Combines theoretical speculation with policy-making pragmatism - Critically questions the implicit foundation of the humanities, asking if the notion of 'the human' and their claims to universality are too narrow and in need of rethinking. Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Hiltraud Casper-Hehne, is Professor of Intercultural German Studies/Language Studies in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Daan F. Oostveen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Culture Inquiry and Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Marjan Ivkovic is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Review Quotes

This stimulating, future-oriented collection clarifies a distinctively European perspective now emerging in the humanities. The critical sophistication of the approach to social relevance, the articulation of close connections with the social, physical and medical sciences, and the alertness to differences in the cultural situations, institutional settings, and the mediating languages and technologies of humanistic knowledge, will do much to sharpen understanding and encourage collaboration in Europe and beyond.

--Helen Small, University of Oxford

About the Author

Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University. She holds honorary doctorates from Helsinki, 2007 and Linkoping, 2013; is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), 2009; Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE), 2014; Knighthood in the order of the Netherlands Lion, 2005). Her publications include: Nomadic Subjects (2011), and Nomadic Theory (2011), Columbia University Press; The Posthuman 2013 and Posthuman Knowledge 2019, Polity Press; in 2016 she co-edited with Paul Gilroy: Conflicting Humanities and in 2018 with Maria Hlavajova: The Posthuman Glossary, both with Bloomsbury Academic.

Hiltraud Casper-Hehne is Professor of Intercultural German Studies/Language Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen. She initiated the project "Interculture" within the framework of the EU university programme Asia-Link between Europe and China. She was Vice-President for International Affairs at the University of Göttingen, a member of the Board of the HERA network and a member of the Executive Board of the Coimbra Group. She also chaired the Council of Experts for the Development of a China Strategy of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Since 2018, she has been a member of the EU-Ad- hoc Expert Group on European Universities.

Marjan Ivkovic is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Serbia. He is also coordinator of the Laboratory for Social Critique at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. He is the author of the monograph Kritička teorija Aksela Honeta: ka prevazilazenju metafizike (The Critical Theory of Axel Honneth: Towards the Overcoming of Metaphysics, IFDT, 2017) and numerous articles in international and Serbian academic journals.

Daan F. Oostveen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Culture Inquiry and Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. He studied philosophy and comparative literature at Ghent University. His PhD from the Faculty of Religion and Theology of VU Amsterdam is on multiple religious belonging. In 2018, he undertook research at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, where he studied Chinese religious diversity. His research interests include comparative religion, posthuman philosophy, and the new humanities.