Probing Humanities, Positioning Human-(i)-ties: New Paradigms and Shifts in the 21st century

CONCEPT NOTE

Two-day International Conference

18-19th December 2025

VSES, VIPS-TC

The phrase Probing Humanities, Positioning Human-[i]-ties is a clarion call to deliberate upon the weakening human-ties, the state of obliviated anthrophy, shrinking spaces of consanguinity of earthlings to their human spirits. The conference aims to station the discipline in the cultural metanarratives, in the vast tapestry of its forces. More than now, humanities have never been so important to redeem and salve the noesis of knowledge and the vital pneuma of the community. Paradigms are transmuting, newer trends unfolding, worldviews becoming, the basal forces universally demand an urgent need to not just probe the discipline but also to situate and squarely position the human-ties reasserting, reminding, reiterating what it means to be human especially in a world, which is energy and technology-driven, AI and data dependent. Friedrich Kittler warns us of the dominance of media and digital technologies in taking over the interpretive disciplines, where he observes: human is being driven “out of the humanities.” Terry Eagleton’s mild caution of the “humanities . . . under siege precisely because they challenge the dominant ideology” is pertinent here. Ridden with uncertainties, newer configurations throw novel challenges; wheeling and dealing, the world is triggered with a sense of bewilderment, contestations give rise to privileging one’s own version of who or what we turn into. With the technocratic, algorithmic and data logics becoming the organizing principles in knowledge production, modes of interpretation and collocation are soon unbecoming/(re)becoming, unsettling the classified and ranked institutions of their regimented and de-pedestrialized dioramas of model existence. In such a scenario, meditations offered by the humanities as dialogue and intervention decode the cultural DNA of societies to preserve, pose, and reveal what we become through such practices.

As with every turn of the century, which brings its own set of bounty and privation, the humanities too have been imposed with mild, sugar-coated suggestions to revamp courses, curriculum curation to incorporate and tweak to the market-driven demands of labour, to the growing sophistication of scientism or the plain debasement of fusionistic course curriculum. It may also be held or believed that humanities work in silos, that it needs to move in and around different axes across the collaboration matrices; merging, acquiring, amalgamating with areas for newer, ingenious thinking paradigms. While these aspirations tend to denature culture, art, literature, language, and philosophy, it sometimes opens doors for anomalous critical modalities and epistemic configurations to emerge. In such a climate, are we headed for a post-posthuman framework where Ihab Hassan anticipates profound critical shifts in the human-centered humanities, hinting towards an emergent posthuman framework of ideological matrix and thought? Or is the humanities lost in the g[l]ory of hyperreality and simulation as Baudrillard describes on the moderating humanistic inquiry? What role does the academic community play in the larger architectural constellation of the society? Are we not meeting the scientific community even halfway or is it the other way round? How is the humanities adapting to the pressures of the market economy? How does it see and seed the future? In the landscape of higher education, is it as if the discipline is on a silent mission, an understated campaign to bring back the humanistic and humanitarian in the world we live in? If the “essence and the inherent strength of humanistic scholarship,” in the words of J.F. Kennedy, is “to illuminate the nature of man” then how does the humanities undertake this pursuit in the twenty-first century? These are some of the questions the conference would explore and dwell on. The conference seeks to tease out some of these entanglements and their syndicates; encapsulate its corollaries, “to build the walls not with arms alone, in the words of Virgil, but with arts and laws that bind.” It will weigh up the exigency and need to revive imagination, sensitize agencies and sensibilities at a time when the ultimate ligature of societies across the globe erodes.

The idea is to address and create pathways of the future that determine the routes and trails which navigate harmonious existence as an upshot rather than wander aimlessly in the domains of empirical knowledges. The conference aims to bring the humanities closer to working arm-in-arm with other disciplines, in concert with its own natural gumption, to avoid getting lost in the wilderness of the future.



Tracks:

We invite contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following related themes and perspectives:

Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies in humanities
Teaching of literary skills and neo-liberal market logic
Life writings in the digital age
Ethics and values in the 21st century
Pedagogical innovations in the classroom
Anthropocene and environmental humanities
Humanities in times of exigencies
Electronic literature and digital humanities
Plant and blue humanities
Energy humanities
Folk studies and collective memory
Intersection of caste, class, and gender
Disability studies
Health humanities
Game and media studies
AI and posthuman turn
Legal humanities
Gender and sexuality studies
Comic and graphic narratives
Memory and cognitive studies
AI and translation studies
Contemporary trends of readership and reading practices
Globalization and attention economy
Curriculum studies
Digital education and social justice
University system and its shifting modalities


We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a 50-word bio note, from faculty, research scholars, and students working in and around the areas mentioned above.

Please send your abstracts by 5th October 2025 to: conferencevips2025@gmail.com

The registration link will be shared after the acceptance of the abstract.

Please refer to the attachment for further details.

Conference Conveners:

Dr. Bhawna Vij Arora

Dr. Natasha Anand

Dr. Faizan Moquim

Contact Information
Student Heads
Vanshita Tuli: tulivanshita@gmail.com
Yuvna Tandon: yuvnadav26@gmail.com

Contact Email
conferencevips2025@gmail.com