Overview
‘It’s life, but not as we know it.’
Mr Spock’s cliché acquires fresh resonances with every announcement of bio-, nano-, cogno-, info-... technological breakthroughs. As life and the human condition are re-imagined, how are different disciplines in the ‘new sciences’ and the ‘post-humanities’ reacting to what they are themselves reshaping? Faced with life but not as they know it, do they still know themselves? Is the prospect of life beyond disciplines coinciding with ‘postdisciplinary lives’? And what is the University to be, ‘after life’?
As various constructions of the future transform our assumptions and perspectives on life, new modes of inquiry are emerging that make the future of academic disciplines look radically open. Perhaps it is even questionable whether the subjects of these futures will still be ‘human(s)’. The afterlife of the disciplines, then, is what we are called to speculate on…
Mr Spock’s cliché acquires fresh resonances with every announcement of bio-, nano-, cogno-, info-... technological breakthroughs. As life and the human condition are re-imagined, how are different disciplines in the ‘new sciences’ and the ‘post-humanities’ reacting to what they are themselves reshaping? Faced with life but not as they know it, do they still know themselves? Is the prospect of life beyond disciplines coinciding with ‘postdisciplinary lives’? And what is the University to be, ‘after life’?
As various constructions of the future transform our assumptions and perspectives on life, new modes of inquiry are emerging that make the future of academic disciplines look radically open. Perhaps it is even questionable whether the subjects of these futures will still be ‘human(s)’. The afterlife of the disciplines, then, is what we are called to speculate on…
