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…

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.

Starting with an art exhibition which explored issues of religious identity, and with an illuminative case study of a "British Muslim" artist, this paper sets out a two-fold impact of approaching religious subjects from the angle of aesthetics. Firstly, the arts can be employed to open out categories of religious identity as non-fixed…

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…

The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has recently transformed its curriculum through a process of curriculum reform. This has been a major institutional transition and has challenged many of the traditional practices of the conservatoire. Taking the global thinking on curriculum reform as its starting point, the conservatoire’s aspiration has been…

This article explores the role of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) in facilitating and encouraging a collaborative community of junior and senior scholars on issues of technology and humanistic learning. As a result of its emphasis on collaboration and discussion, HASTAC encourages a form of collective…

Digital scholarship is becoming a contested area. The huge potential offered by the affordances of the technological possibilities has been illustrated by a range of contributors both in this issue and elsewhere. Other commentators are less convinced about the nature of the changes and the inevitability of changes to the practices of academics.…

We report on the experience of creating a socially networked system, the Research-oriented Social Environment (RoSE), for representing knowledge in the form of relationships between people, documents, and groups. Developed as an intercampus, interdisciplinary project of the University of California, this work reflects on a collaboration between…

This article examines the ways in which the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) can be integrated into graduate education in the humanities to support future faculty preparation in teaching. Drawing on data from a multi-year project at a research-1 institution in the United States, and theories from postmodern geography and postcolonial…

Given the academic specialization endemic today in humanities disciplines, some of the most important work of humanities centers has become promoting education about the humanities in general. After charting the rise of humanities centers in the US, three characteristics of centers that enable their advancement of larger concerns of the humanities…

More collaborative work in the humanities could be instrumental in helping to break down the traditional rigid boundaries between academic divisions and disciplines in modern universities. The value of the traditional model of the solitary humanities scholar or the collaborative science paradigm should not be discounted. However, increasing the…

In the past, humanists and scientists have held very different views about the role of collaboration in scholarly research. From the point of view of a Principal Investigator in a scientific laboratory, this article examines the increasingly dominant role of collaboration in scientific research. In contrast to the "consensus research" model of the…

The article argues that, in the teaching of religion at undergraduate level, many students approach understanding the historical or contemporary Middle East in ways that are coloured by what they think is biblical knowledge or basic Christian beliefs. This is less noticeable for students in disciplines such as history or politics. Many history or…

This article argues the importance of including religion in the curriculum of undergraduate studies. Religion is, at its nexus, an ideology, a belief system that reverberates through literature and history. Such knowledge in itself is invaluable for students, introducing them to the difference between ideology and fact and to how ideology becomes…

This review of the 5th International Conference held by the University of the Arts London's Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design, 12 and 13 April 2010 at the Novotel, Tiergarten, Berlin, briefly summarizes the contributions of three keynote speakers, and considers some of the issues they raised. (Contains 1 note.)