The conference, "Rethinking Humanities in the Age of Visual" attempts to interrogate how the future of humanities can be traced and interpreted from various academic and philosophical quarters, and the ways in which interdisciplinary endeavours in all realms of knowledge respond to this effort. It is widely accepted that Humanities in the academia has encountered unusually critical challenges in the last few decades. The question of how these challenges are transmitted through the corpus, and the methodological and canonical framework of traditional Humanities, will be pivotal in the making of the conference. The fact that one of the major paradigms which re-organized many disciplines, including social sciences in the last century, was the paradigm of visual culture and this issue has been crucial in designing the theme of this conference. The age of the 'visual', with its alteration of the priorities of modernity and the privileging of the spectacle, incites serious reconsideration of Humanities within the contexts of the cultural practices of 21st century.

Conference issues:

Contemporary interpretations of the crisis in humanities/The genealogies of interdisciplinarity in humanities/The historical contexts of evolution of humanities/Humanities and Social Sciences/Posthumanities and production of knowledge/ Humanities and artificial intelligence/Theories of techno-culture and Cyber space and humanities/Humanities and globalization/Humanities and visual culture/Philosophy in 21st century Academia/The theory and practice of the arts in the 21st century/Art and aesthetics as disciplines/Theatre studies and interdisciplinary approaches/Performance and philosophy /Technology and Humanities/Art and Social Sciences/Visual Arts and the Virtual Reality/20th century approaches to humanities/The future of humanities in Asia. There are more than seventy presentations by scholars from India and abroad related to these themes.

Inaugural Address: Ashis Nandy

(Senior Honorary Fellow, CSDS, Delhi)

Keynote Address: Gayathri Chakravorthy Spivak

(Chair, Comparative Literature, Columbia University)