23-5-2025, Utrecht University
The Humanities Honours Programme (HHP) organizes a symposium with a kaleidoscopic perspective on cross-disciplinarity.
Interdisciplinarity is the academic mantra of our time: the future of research and university teaching lies under its spell. There is an abundance of theoretical literature on the new trends of interdisciplinarity, yet a comparative evaluation of the praxis of cooperation from humanities disciplines with disciplines outside the humanities is missing. New fields like Medical Humanities and Environmental Humanities have been founded, but what they have in common with each other or with more open, flexible forms of encounters outside the humanities and even outside academia is an open question. Multidisciplinarity is used sometimes as a concept of a lesser form of the interdisciplinary holy grail of integration (the route into neo-disciplines). This dogmatic view has to be corrected as both multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity have intrinsic value. This symposium wants to explore the whole spectrum of different foci from the integration or assimilation of disciplines into neo-disciplines to lose encounters or dialogues which can be as promising as well.
This symposium offers general introductions of different cross-disciplinary fields by UU staff and some guest speakers. HHP-students will present case-studies from the recent course ‘Humanities in Context’. A panel discussion led by Iris van der Tuin, Dean of Interdisciplinary Education UU, will conclude the symposium.
Registration (before 22th of May): cross.disciplinarysymposium@gmail.com