Cultural Transmission & Disciplinary Change

The theme for the academic years 2007-08 and 2008-09 is Cultural Transmission and Disciplinary Change, a linked two-year theme taking the Centre into Cambridge's 800th anniversary year. CRASSH themes are designed to be hospitable to a broad constituency of researchers and to encourage disciplinary innovation. The Centre's integrated two-year programme of research activities provides opportunities for both existing and emerging work. Activities associated with the theme include the visiting fellowship programme, the early career fellowship programme, and a progamme of seminars, research groups, and conferences throughout the year.The two-year theme will provide scope for topics such as the re-embedding of ideas, religions, ethnicities, histories, objects, knowledge-practices, laws, human systems, and aesthetics across time and space. It emphasizes movement and exchange, contestation and fertilization, as well as the impact of globalization. Both years will also encourage reflection on the changing boundaries of academic disciplines, past, present, and future; the idea, history, and function of the modern university; the nature of 'discipline' as it operates within and beyond universities; and the university's contribution to the well-being of the community more broadly. The theme offers an arena for exploring the ways in which cultural transmission and disciplinary change fold into one another.

Issues to be explored might include:

  • How are cultures transmitted and re-embedded? What role do objects, languages, ideas, and religions play in encounters between peoples and nations (conquered and subject, east and west)? Is the concept of culture a useful analytic tool?

  • How do theories of translation lend themselves to ideas about the transmission, rewriting, or non-transmission of texts (musical, written, drawn)? What kinds of transmission or forgetting are involved in symbolic or memorial activities?

  • How does our concern with heritage, conservation, and museum culture respond to cultural and environmental change? Can the legacies of the past be transmitted without antiquarianism or cultural theft? What problems are posed by preservation?

  • How does technology act as a channel (or an impediment) for cultural transmission? How do different practices of knowledge-production illuminate each other? How are social formations shaped by 'discipline'?

  • How do new forms of communication initiate change? How do disciplinary protocols shift under the impact of new forms of knowledge and production? What is the role of economics in transforming or informing research-objectives?

  • What is the role of 'travelling concepts'? How have disciplines responded to paradigms and theories imported from elsewhere? Is the term 'interdisciplinarity' another name for disciplinary change?

  •  What do we understand by a modern university? How do the logics and dialogics of ancient forms of learning shape modern intellectual exchange? What forms can the transmission of knowledge take today?

  •  Are the divisions between 'Humanities', 'Social Sciences' and 'Sciences' still functional? What is gained from contesting the boundaries of disciplinary organization? Can research be practiced without a disciplinary base?

  • How have research cultures changed the way we think of relations between science and society? Between universities and their publics? Does inclusion or exclusion from academic cultures affect what counts as knowledge?

  • What kinds of responsibility face the modern university and what will its role be in the future? What can we learn from the disciplinary formations of the past? Can we formulate or predict new disciplinary imperatives for the future?

  • In what ways do educational systems and institutions contribute to the transmission and re-embedding of cultures? What strategies are available to accommodate cultural change and diversity? How do they contribute to social and economic well-being?

  • Is research itself a transmissible form of culture? Can it function as an agent of change? Does reflecting on research within the university lead to better understanding of its role in knowledge-production? What part can the university play in the larger community?

 

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