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- Thursday 23rd February, 2012 |
Speakers: |
The current crisis in higher education has required a spirited defence of the value of the arts and humanities. Likely this defence has not been sufficient to the task.
Last year, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Sheffield staged an event that aimed to articulate, discuss and defend “The Value of the Arts and Humanities”. We heard about many ways of valuing and reasons to value an arts and humanities education from a newspaper columnist, a politician, a businessman, a Higher Education administrator, and an academic critic of Higher Education policy.
This event does not offer a defence. It has not been curated to answer the denigration of the value of the arts and humanities with a palatable restatement of their virtues. This event offers a counter proposition: that the task of the arts and humanities, both in their creative and educative aspects, is to contest, to challenge, to question, to undermine, to satirise, to offend, to violate, to deconstruct, to degenerate, to critique, to undo, or to suspend dominant and dominating assumptions of value. The purpose of the arts and humanities, the purpose of the university, is to think against value.
Inspired by the exploits of Dada artists refusing the discourse of reason during the First World War, by the critique of audit cultures, and of the damaging instrumentalisation of education, this event has been curated to ask, if not answer, the following: Who owns value? For whom does value speak? Does value arrest thinking?
The event will hopefully prove the start of a different conversation about strategies of resistance that channel the resentment and anger of students and scholars and inspire some of the following: patience and slow thinking, happiness, negativity, indeterminacy, doubt, punk, ambivalence, failure, dissonant thinking, dissident imaginations.
Please address any questions to Dr Sam Ladkin at s.ladkin@sheffield.ac.uk and/or Dr Bob Mckay at R.McKay@sheffield.ac.uk.