“Do the arts and the humanities still have a place in the contemporary university system, and do they still matter?” Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner (University of Queensland)

Date: Monday 19 October
Time: 5:30-6:30pm
Venue: The Pit, Te Ara Hihiko, Massey University (Wellington Campus), Entrance E, Tasman St, Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand
Contact: Elspeth Tilley
Register: Free public event, all welcome. More info here.

As universities the world over corporatise and commercialise, and as the university increasingly defines itself as a location for training, on the one hand, and scientific research, on the other, the connection between the university and a liberal education is starting to attenuate. A key location where the pressure of such an evolution is being felt is in the disciplines within the humanities and creative arts sector.

Join Professor Graeme Turner as he draws upon a major study of the condition of the humanities, arts and social sciences in Australia, and addresses the placement of these disciplines in a context where the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are sucking up most of the oxygen.

Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner is the founding Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (2000-2012), and one of the leading figures in cultural and media studies in Australia and internationally. His research has covered a wide range of forms and media – literature, film, television, radio, new media, journalism, and popular culture. He has published 23 books with national and international academic presses; the most recent is (with Anna Cristina Pertierra) Locating Television: Zones of Consumption (Routledge, 2013). A past president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2004-2007), an ARC Federation Fellow (2006-2011) and Convenor of the ARC-funded Cultural Research Network (2006-2010), he has had considerable engagement with federal research and higher education policy. He is only the second humanities scholar to serve on the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. In collaboration with Dr Kylie Brass, Professor Turner is the author of a major research monograph prepared for the Department of Industry and the Academies of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mapping the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia (2014), and he has been appointed as the chair of the Humanities and Creative Arts Panel for ERA 2015. His current research projects include an ARC funded international comparative study of the social function of television in the post-broadcast digital environment in collaboration with Dr Anna Cristina Pertierra, a collection of essays on Asian television histories, co-edited with Dr Jinna Tay, to be published by Routledge in 2015, and the completion of his book, Reinventing the Media, also to be published by Routledge in 2015. In 2015 he will be the Bonnier Visiting Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Stockholm University.