Staff profiles: Being Human: Past, Present and Future
View members of staff working in the Being Human: Past,…
Research priority area
Being Human: Past, Present and Future
This research priority area was established in the university to address areas of research that were concerned with human experience and a sense of heritage and direction.
This research priority area draws on the riches of the past, with the formative potency of memory, and focuses on engaging with modern thinking about humanity in the cyber-age and considering possible futures.
The modern post-secularised situation is one which looks for the recovery of meaning following the profound loss of commonly accepted construals of reality. Within this context, the questioning of what it means to be human is a key imperative underlying the area’s direction of research.
This is inseparable from acknowledging how the meaning of the human is continually contested by, and inextricably entwined with, powerful forces of globalisation, spectacular advances in technology and scientific knowledge, and conflicts over politics, ideology and resources.
Heritage and direction
This strand of the research area is related to the preservation, encoding and transference of our collective experience, and what might be called our mimetic inheritance. This inheritance embraces a wide body of work, and research in philosophy, theology, history, English, art, and writing, ranging from literary, film, language and cultural studies to computer science and journalism among others.
Meaning and reality
This strand of the research priority area focuses on artistic, cultural, curatorial, and critical concerns. This includes artistic, philosophical, and spiritual enterprises, and the critical study of textual and visual artefacts, and social and material conditions of the production of such artefacts. Research in this area focuses on the study, questioning, and representation of the nature of our reality, and in finding ways for us to critically examine it, including through the generation of artistic media, and through the reception of such media.
Forces and contests
This strand of the research priority area focuses on the study and representation of the conflicts and contests one finds where powerful forces come into apposition and opposition, and what that means for us as individuals and as a species. Naturally, there is significant cross-fertilisation of ideas with the other two strands, and this strand covers a broad range of work in Literary, Historical and Philosophical Studies, while also including work produced in artistic and other media.
Projects
Research centres
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The Being Human Research Centre brings arts, humanities and media academics together to conduct research on what being human has meant across the sweep of human history, what it means in the current conditions of the world, and what it will mean in the future.
To discover more contact Arran Stibbe: [email protected]. -
WAM is a research group consisting of scholars who are working together to explore a range of research themes focusing on older women and popular media forms (digital technologies, film, popular music and television).
To discover more contact Professor Ros Jennings: [email protected]. -
The International Centre for Biblical Interpretation aims to promote scholarship that studies the Bible in its various ancient contexts and engages with its subject matter in such a way as to advocate its continuing significance for life in church and society.
To discover more visit the ICB blog or contact Professor Gordon McConville: [email protected].
Questions?
Contact Prof. Nigel McLoughlin, research priority area convenor for Being Human: Past, Present and Future.
Phone
We’ll get back to you as soon as we can within office hours
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