Commitments - Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge

Call for Papers

ECTS: 5

The aesthetic and cultural theoretical disciplines have historically been characterized by different forms of political commitments. This graduate seminar seeks to revisit questions about the relationship between scholarly and political commitments by asking: What models and approaches are relevant if we are to try to describe and discuss political engagement in art and cultural studies today?

The past years have brought a renewed focus on the political conditions of research and the role of research-based knowledge in the development of politics. While the Covid-19 pandemic on the one hand demonstrated a global investment in infrastructures of science, the pandemic has on the other hand given apt examples of the frictions and at times incommensurable relationship between the world of science and the world of politics. Parallel to the public debates about the role of research- based knowledges in political decisions on everything from lock-down to vaccine programs, research fields in the humanities on contested societal issues such as sexism, racism, climate change, war and human rights have been subject to renewed and increased attacks from both politicians and special interest groups.

The media debates on the nature and norms of scholarly commitments in the humanities has frequently veered off track, as the discussion has tended to reduce the complexities of scholarly commitments into a conflict between two scientific ideals, an ideal of “objectivity” and universality and an ideal of societal relevance, scholarly engagement, and “activist” engagement in real-world change. This simplistic schema often leads to a superficial, though emotionally highly charged, “for or against” attitude. But it also ignores the multiple levels and varying forms of commitments that most scholars have - both in the humanities and social sciences and in the natural sciences - and that have historically characterized artists and their artworks.

Against this background, this graduate seminar seeks to create a space to discuss, analyze and historicize questions of political commitments of art and science. Questions we seek to ask include: How are the art objects we study committed to certain values and engaged in societal debates? How do we read commitment from a cultural object? And how do we reconstruct the wider web of political discourse in the past and situate a work of art within it? In which ways do aesthetic phenomena hinder or enable societal engagement? Similarly, how does scholarship itself involve a range of explicit or implicit commitments? What is the spectrum of critical engagement and how do we make it explicit? What is the relationship between political engagement and critique? Which forms of knowledge are - or can be – validated as such? How does the increasing focus on practice-based research affect traditional scientific disciplines?

In addition to these questions, topics include, but are not limited to

• The nature and variety of scholarly commitments
• Engaged art and the particular forms of artistic commitments
• Science and political activism
• The role of the intellectual
• Forms and formats of scientific knowledge
• Political frames for scholarship (e.g. the UN’s sustainability goals, “impact” etc.)

Paper propopals (abstracts)

Paper proposals (abstracts) of 200-300 words should be sent to the organizers Anders Engberg- Pedersen (engberg@sdu.dk), Mathias Danbolt (danbolt@hum.ku.dk) and Jacob Lund (jacoblund@cc.au.dk) by February 15, 2022.

Organized by 

This graduate seminar is co-organized by graduate schools in literature, art, and cultural studies at the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Copenhagen, and Aarhus University.