Planetary Humanities: On Relational and Interdisciplinary Methodologies

Program Public Lecture

How can we conceptualise a future for the humanities that respects and honours the need for decolonisation but does not set out only from a basis in critical identity politics, and that retains a concern for progressive leaps in epistemology? In this lecture, with reference to a program of planetary anthropological research on the digitization of music in the global South and North, Georgina Born outlines a set of ambitious conceptual and methodological principles for the future humanities centred on relational and interdisciplinary, yet still critical, perspectives. Such reflexive principles open out hopeful vistas beyond the fundamental impasses dogging the inherited, traditional disciplines.

Program Workshop

Tuesday, May 23, 2023: One-day Workshop on 'Planetary Humanities'

The main theme of the morning is: ‘On Modes and Logics of Interdisciplinarity’. We discuss Barry and Born’s book, Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Natural and Social Sciences, with reference to two core, guiding concepts: the existence of distinct ‘modes’ and ‘logics’ of interdisciplinarity. We focus on the ‘agonistic-antagonistic’ mode and the logic of ontology as inventive concepts, probing them with reference to medical humanities (ch. 10, Greco) and interdisciplinarity in social and natural sciences (ch. 1, Barry and Born).
The main theme of the afternoon is: ‘Asymmetries: On art-science, artistic research and music research’. Through a discussion of art-science (ch. 11, Born and Barry), we pursue how modes and logics of interdisciplinarity arise, and how they can be operationalised, in our own interdisciplinary research in the arts and music.

Workshop and Lecture: Prof. Georgina Born

Georgina Born is Professor of Anthropology and Music at UCL (University College London) and was previously an experimental musician. Her work combines ethnographic and theoretical writings on music, sound, interdisciplinarity, and digital media. She directed the ERC research program ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation’, has been visiting professor at UC Berkeley and Princeton, McGill and Oslo Universities, and is now directing the ERC program ‘Music and AI: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies’.

Registration

Please register for the workshops via KSL: www.ksl.unibe.ch. To attend the lecture and workshop: please send an e-mail to nicola.leuchter@unibe.ch to get the ZOOM link.