Funding organisations are increasingly asking academics to show evidence of the economic and social value generated by their research. These requests have often been associated with the emergence of a so-called "new social contract for research" and are related to the implementation of new research evaluation systems. Although the…

If there is a topic on which the humanities might make a distinctive claim, it is that of consciousness--an essential aspect of human being. And within the humanities, music might make its own claims in relation to both consciousness and being human. To investigate this connection, David Clarke and Eric Clarke brought together a wide variety of…

A historic dialectic exists between the beautiful and the bestial. The bestial destroys the beautiful, but in a bloody miracle, the beautiful emerges from the womb of the bestial, the "terrible beauty" of which the poet W. B. Yeats wrote. The liberal arts, so often thought to dwell in a remote ivory tower, embody this dialectic. Wars and…

Critical responses to changes in UK higher education have emerged from various quarters. This article suggests that some of these responses are collusive with neo-liberalism and that a greater attention might be paid to the possibilities of the word "liberal" and to the more democratic implications of certain US initiatives.

In 2012, Digital Humanities became one of the most talked-about topics in the humanities and was suggested as a movement that could possibly help halt the decline in the traditional humanities. A flurry of books appeared, and "AHHE" produced two special issues, "Digital humanities," "digital futures" and "The…

This article introduces a novel approach to pedagogy within an art school in the UK HE sector, based upon a synthesis of perception theory and communication theory. It is argued that art students' drawing is empowered by strategies of teaching informed by aspects of James J. Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception relevant to…

The overlap between the visual and textual in practice research provides an opportunity to explore ways of presenting knowledge through "performance writin". The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a performance writing practice can be incorporated into and shape research writing. This text uses descriptions of Jean-Martin…

This paper examines the positioning of art practice as a mode of research through various legitimising practices. While frequently fruitful, the imperative to make art justify itself as a form of research in order to achieve legitimacy allows that in art which does not engage in negative dialectics to slip from view. The possibility of the kind of…

This paper discusses the problematic category of "things known" to be the masculine hegemony ("His House") through which we experience reality, and the challenging situation of inhabiting dichotomous frameworks of knowledge. Methods are defined within practice in work that is process led, that investigate the relationship…

This article gives Michael Agar's email responses to two questions put by Gavin Melles: "What are your thoughts on the advantages and dangers of developments in applied anthropology for ethnographic and anthropology practice?" and "What are your impressions of the potential and actual use of ethnography in design?" The…

In this article I outline how a digital-visual-sensory approach to anthropological ethnography might participate in the making of relationship between design and anthropology. While design anthropology is itself coming of age, the potential of its relationship with applied visual anthropology methodology and theory has not been considered in the…

Higher education in Australia is currently in a state of flux, with the Federal Government's Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency commencing operations in January 2012. The "After Standards Project" has been working with Australian university history departments and the Australian Historical Association, educating and empowering the…

In an early dialogue, "On Order", Augustine sets out a program for thinking about thinking. Through such reflections, students attain self-knowledge and prepare for philosophical inquiry. The liberal arts are useful for this project, insofar as they provide opportunities for thinking, yet they are not ultimately necessary. I suggest that "On…

In their 2011 study "Academically Adrift," Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa present considerable evidence that undergraduates in US colleges and universities make surprisingly little progress in their first two years of college. While acknowledging the force of this argument, the authors ask whether Arum and Roksa's evidence--about students'…

"Using your profanisaurus" derives from a project, "The Production of University English", whose earliest findings were published in "Arts and Humanities in Higher Education" in 2005. By analysing "ordinary" discussions in "ordinary" English Literature classes in diverse universities, the project seeks to uncover what really happens when English…