On Friday 14 March Paul Smith, Director of the British Council US, joined TORCH for the "Activist Humanities" conference, which brought together scholars from around the globe including Nigeria, Tunisia, China, India and Egypt to discuss how the humanities can promote social change. In a piece published by the Guardian today he reflects further upon some of the issues raised at the conference.
He argues that "socio-economic progress, developmental challenges and the intelligent addressing of complex world issues require a combination of skills drawn from the humanities, social sciences and Stem subjects to design and deliver holistic and fully informed solutions. Increasingly, development agencies assert that technologically sound, engineering-based projects are failing because they don't take sufficient account of the cultural context. These projects, in concept, design and implementation, lack the human perspective that recognises that no global issue, developmental problem or socio-economic challenge can be fully understood, let alone resolved, without real evidence of how the local community and the rest of humanity are experiencing it."
Please click here for the full article on the Guardian website.
Humanities & the Public Good
