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Introduction: the Humanities and Citizenship Georgia Christinidis & Heather Ellis

Received: 4 October 2012 / Accepted: 15 October 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012

The discourse of the knowledge (-based) economy constitutes a particular challenge for the humanities: where the role of the university is thought of in purely economic terms, the humanities must strive for legitimacy exclusively on the grounds of their ability to contribute to economic and technological development. This discourse fundamentally disempowers the humanities by neglecting their specificity and socializing function. The articles contained in this special issue seek to expand the paradigm within which the role of the humanities, both in the academy and in society more broadly, is conceptualized. Central to this is examining the changing functions which the humanities have fulfilled in different historical and cultural contexts. Historically, the rise of the humanities to prominence within the Western academy was closely linked to the emergence of the nation state and the ideal of the university as a guardian of national culture in the nineteenth century. However, in an increasingly globalized world, where the category of the nation state is progressively eroded in favor of transnational connections, this role has been fundamentally undermined. New approaches and multiple recontextualizations are therefore needed if we are to accurately assess the position and function of the humanities “without,” in the words of Bill Readings, “recourse either to nostalgia for national culture or to the discourse of consumerism” (Readings 1996, p. 19). It was to discuss these and related questions that a number of scholars working in different areas of the humanities and social sciences, including literary studies, history, philosophy, political science, and modern languages, gathered at the Centre for British Studies in Berlin in September 2011 to take part in the workshop: “The Changing Role of the Humanities in the Academy and Society,” generously funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.1 To discuss the 1

In order to carry on discussions of the changing role of the humanities arising from the conference, in addition to this special issue, the editors have also set up a blog entitled “Why Humanities?” which can be visited at http://why-humanities.blogspot.de/

G. Christinidis (*) : H. Ellis Centre for British Studies, Mohrenstr. 60, 10117 Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] URL: http://www.gbz.hu-berlin.de/staff/staff/profil-christinidis

H. Ellis e-mail: [email protected] URL: http://www.hope.ac.uk/staffindex/staffmembers/name,13886,en.html

J Knowl Econ

challenges currently facing the humanities and discuss possible future directions from as global a perspective as possible, it was important that participants come from a wide range of countries including the USA, the UK, Germany, Norway, Finland, and Greece. In many ways, the socializing role of the humanities (in particular, in relation to the education