Tuesday 18 September 2012

Boston



We're delighted to be on our way to Boston to take part in a fascinating conference co-organized by the BABEL Working Group, Boston College, Northeastern University, M.I.T., Tufts University, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cutural studies, and punctum books:
"Cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university".

Thus I propose an abandonment of disciplinary grounding but an abandonment that retains as structurally essential the question of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges. This is why the university should not exchange the rigid and outmoded disciplines for a simply amorphous interdisciplinary space in the humanities (as if we could still organize knowledge around the figure of “Man”). Rather, the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question. . . . [which would] keep open the question of what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so grouped in the past.
~Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

There's a fully packed programme over three days, and we'll be presenting the 3rd plenary session on Saturday.