Professor Yasmin Haskell, who is the UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations at Monash University in Australia, is launching an interdisciplinary forum/reading group, probably meeting Wednesdays once a month, to kick-start a project titled Glossanthropy: Prospects for a new intercultural humanism.
One of the aims is to build a team(s) to explore funding and collaborations with others in our (international) UNITWIN network. It could be a nice opportunity for ECRs especially to be named associates with the UNESCO Chair. If you or your grad students are interested please contact yasmin.haskell@monash.edu
Glossanthropy: Prospects for a new intercultural humanism
This project seeks to promote the flourishing of human persons and communities, and intercultural and interreligious understanding, through comparative study and (re-)activation of natural language-arts traditions worldwide.
We propose a radical comparison of the culturally leavening effects in early modern Europe of Renaissance humanism — a movement predicated on the recovery of ‘interrupted’ traditions of poetry, rhetoric, history and moral philosophy — with those of diverse historical and contemporary language-led cultural revivals worldwide. How might such movements and their discursive practices help us understand what it is to be ‘human’ at a time of accelerating erosion of linguistic and biological diversity?
In recent decades, humanities scholars have pursued various ‘posthumanist’ and ‘transhumanist’ critical agendas, to correct the blindspots of the European Enlightenment, respond to the challenges of the climate crisis, and, more controversially, in the hope of transcending our natural humanity through technoscientific intervention. With the advent of Large Language Model generative AI, however, we face a critical inflection point for our species. Not only does OpenAI’s GPT pose a clear and present danger to foreign-language learning, it threatens human diversity, subjectivity and creativity.
The plan is to establish a dynamic group of junior and established scholars from Monash and beyond, to:
- identify moments or movements of cultural renewal via language arts in different historical and contemporary world cultures;
- document the role of poetry, story-telling, conversation, dialogue and other forms of eloquence in these moments or movements of cultural renewal;
- bring diverse humanistic traditions into productive dialogue on questions of the human person, society, and relationships with nature and the divine.
- appraise the historical successes and failures of ‘Renaissance humanism’ as a medium for intercultural and interreligious dialogue in the early modern period.
The UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations is a member of the UNITWIN IDIU network.