Living Knowledge: Knowing Humans Making Culture
2003 HUMANZ Conference
National Library, Wellington
29-30 August 2003
The purpose of this conference is to investigate the role of cultural knowledge as living knowledge originating in human experience, social practice and cultural institutions, providing the fabric of meanings within which people and societies negotiate their relations with the natural world and each other. Living Knowledge: Knowing Humans Making Culture
2003 HUMANZ Conference
National Library, Wellington
29-30 August 2003
The purpose of this conference is to investigate the role of cultural knowledge as living knowledge originating in human experience, social practice and cultural institutions, providing the fabric of meanings within which people and societies negotiate their relations with the natural world and each other.In the present world order, thinking about knowledge is dominated by the interrelation of western science, technology and economic production. In this context, cultural knowledge is often considered ambivalently: as an obstacle to economic development; a counter to the risk of social and economic change; the distinctive possession of indigenous peoples; the foundation of national identity; something of value only if copyrighted.
Human societies exist through language and the value-laden knowledge it communicates and stores. Cultural knowledge is the bedrock on which human societies and economies are built; it is vital knowledge, being both created and conserved by real people in the ordinary process of social living in specific places and landscapes.
Key note Speaker
Professor Iain McCalman,
President, Australian Academy of the Humanities and Director, Humanities
Research Centre, Australian National University
Taking Cultural Research to the World
Call for papers
Offers of papers are sought for two sections of the conference programme:
Tomorrow's Knowledge and Working Knowledge
Tomorrow's Knowledge, the conference's opening session, provides an opportunity for emerging scholars and researchers to reflect from their own vantage points on intellectual, institutional and social changes which are significant for knowledge work in the domains of society and culture in New Zealand.
Postgraduate students and recent graduates - within the last five years - who have subsequently taken up employment in institutions of learning, or in other research or policy based organisations, are invited to propose papers
by sending a 200 word abstract to the conference organisers by 30 May 2003.
Accepted authors will be invited to prepare papers of no more than 2000 words to be circulated to other conference speakers prior to the conference.
Of these authors, eight will be invited to give 15-minute oral presentations based on their papers.
Participants in this section - authors and speakers - will also be invited to act as a caucus to identify and report back at the end of the conference on the important issues they see arising out of the conference as a whole.
Working Knowledge
The general issue to be investigated in this section is, How do experts in the fields of social and cultural knowledge - including the governmental sector, the arts, and academia - think about the value of their knowledge to
society? How important is it to think of this knowledge as public knowledge?
Papers are invited on any aspect of this issue. Please send a 200 word abstract to the conference organisers by 30 May 2003. Accepted authors will be invited to prepare papers of no more than 2000 words to be circulated to other conference speakers prior to the conference. Of these authors, four will be invited to give 15-minute oral presentations based on their papers, two following each of the principal speakers.
Please email enquiries, offers of papers and
further information about the conference, including the full programme and registration details, can be found at: www.humanz.org.nz
A reduced rate for the conference is available for members of HUMANZ.
Contact: Dr Brian Opie
President,
Humanities Society of New Zealand
Phone (04) 463 6812 [work]
(04) 971 6016 [home]
Fax (04) 463-5148
Email brian.opie@vuw.ac.nz
www.humanz.org.nz