Abstract
What is the place and value of the applied-public humanities as a liminal multidisciplinary discourse in a globalised, cosmopolitan, technologised knowledge economy? What kinds of transferable cross-disciplinary competencies can the humanities embed to reimagine the employability-global citizenship-personal development triad of educational goals? The humanities occupy a critical space in academia and human life, whereby through the study of human acts, artefacts and processes, they construct a unique vision of societies and cultures to build a robust, equitable planet. In a post-truth, media and AI saturated world, it is imperative for the humanities to recalibrate the ways in which its public and applied nature unfolds. Through a metareview of the underlying philosophical principles of the public and the applied humanities in higher education scholarship, current inter- and multidisciplinary areas of its study, and international status-of-the-humanities reports (2015-2025) from across the globe, I comment on its evolving understanding as an applied-public discipline that is professionally engaged, value-driven, process-oriented and ethico-ideological. As liminal, liberal humanist spaces of knowledge construction and social transformation, the applied-public humanities bring systems thinking, cosmopolitan ethics, syncretism, indigenous knowledge, intercultural, research and communicative competencies to inform professional development goals. The paper thereby presents an adaptable transferable competence framework for the applied-public humanities for the 21st century that can create professional public intellectuals, and comments on its potential as a “public pedagogy” that reimagines the frontiers of professional-civic-personal horizons through educational objectives to create sustainable futures.
Presenters
Nishevita JayendranAssistant Professor (Literature and Humanities), Centre of Excellence in Teacher Education, School of Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Beyond Borders: The Role of the Humanities in Reimagining Communities
KEYWORDS
Applied-public humanities, Public intellectuals, Public pedagogy, Transferable competencies
