Questions of imagination, creativity, and epistemic practice raise problems of disciplinary decadence, which emerges when researchers, scholars, and teachers fetishize their disciplines and methods at the expense of reality and wider commitments. An offspring of disciplinary decadence is the colonization of knowledge, where, as we have seen, the modes of producing knowledge could be colonized by political, economic, or instrumentalist projects, prevails. Such a predicament includes also the subordination of free inquiry to market forces and professional coercion. The effort to transcend such impositions at times takes the form of a creative synthesis, of bringing different disciplines together in constructive ways. And at other times it takes the form of going beyond extant disciplines through the production of new disciplines or, more radically, going beyond disciplines as the organizational model of producing knowledge. Are such efforts possible? And if so, are they desirable?
This conference will bring together scholars from across the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and the natural sciences, to discuss these and other varieties of challenges faced by higher education in this second decade of the twenty-first century and their significance as humanity struggles, amid many social, political, cultural, economic, and environmental upheavals, to lay the groundwork for the twenty-second. The triumvirate of research, scholarship, and teaching is here offered to unsettle the dominating binary of research and teaching, where scholarship is often excluded as an aspect of the academic’s vocation. As well, the addition of scholarship raises considerations on the practice of teaching, for where teaching is guided by scholarship it becomes an activity by which the teacher is also the dedicated student, the devotee of learning committed to pedagogical imperatives of intellectual growth. |
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