Humanities and Social Sciences 2.0: A User Guide

What are the root causes of the undesirable futures we currently keep creating? To tackle today’s daunting challenges, we need critical self-awareness and courage to dare to reimagine and reanimate our communal spaces of research, learning, and personal growth, and of our collective diplomacy and communication, purpose and action. Only a strategic boost of the Humanities and Social Sciences can accomplish this in our STEM-and-Business-driven world. But how can we redesign our Humanities and Social Science disciplines, which are still deeply rooted in the 19^th century European nation state, to serve human flourishing in the 21^st century?

This lecture sketches a user guide for Humanities and Social Sciences 2.0, proposing a vision that radically expands the study of the human experience on our planet in deep space and deep time, proposes blended STEMAH (STEM & Arts & Humanities) research and pedagogy design, reimagines our disciplines’ pertinence to the grand challenges of today’s world, and develops a methodology of practice that reaches across all sectors of our world’s communities and societies and catalyzes planetary flourishing.

Wiebke Denecke

• C. Fang Chair for Chinese Language and Culture
• Full Professor of Chinese and Language and Culture and Professor of East Asian Literatures and Philosophies

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Faculty Lead, MIT Global Humanities Initiative 

Founding Editor-in-Chief, The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature, Oxford University Press