This advanced research seminar is jointly hosted with the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHR).

The Seminar will focus on the contemporary challenges to the University as a consequence both of technological innovations, political contestations, epistemological reconfigurations and the emergence of new knowledge formations and cognitive assemblages. It will examine the conditions under which traditional knowledge institutions might still be able to respond effectively to new learning environments and publics. Speakers from Vietnam, China and East Asia will join us for this event. The Seminar will ask again, what is the University for? What types of institutional formats are currently best positioned not simply to respond to contemporary political, technological and epistemic shifts, but to innovate in the wake of them? Which kinds of ideas and forms of thinking underpin such “new thinking”? What are the different modes of critique and circulation of knowledge made possible by the advent of new technologies? What conception of the University would constitute the most effective response to the set of challenges it is being confronted with, in contexts both national and global?

For more information and for a copy of the programme, contact Prof Sarah Nuttall (sarah.nuttall@wits.ac.za).