Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Stuart Cunningham
Professor and Director
Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre
Queensland University of Technology
2004

Stuart Cunningham, The humanities, creative arts and the innovation agenda, in Innovation in Australian arts, media and design: Fresh Challenges for the Tertiary Sector, eds Rod Wissler, Brad Haseman, Sue-Anne Wallace and Michael Keane, Post Pressed, Flaxton. 2004, pp. 221-232.

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For debates about the place of the humanities, the values they espouse and the insights they instill - their use, in short - we I can go a long way back to Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle and Cardinal Newman's idea of the university, but I am not going back that far. In fact, it seems only yesterday - but it was the early 1990s - that there was a big debate about the humanities and its role in contemporary higher education.

In part occasioned by the claims of 'cultural policy studies' and in part about the Dawkins reforms, this was a debate about first principles defences of the humanities against what were presented as historically- rather than philosophically-grounded, non-humanistic, accounts of the humanities (see Hunter et al 1991). Geoff Stokes offered an account of the history of the university in Australia that stressed its alignment with national priorities and planning. Bruce Smith talked about the way normative interventions in schooling were crucial to embedding the influence of the humanities academy. And Ian Hunter and John Frow exchanged Foucauldian and neo-Marxist analyses of the role of the humanities that gave rise to a memorable trading of titles in Meanjin in 1992 and 1993. Hunter opened with 'the humanities without humanism', to which Frow replied 'the humanities without humans'! At the time also, Ken Ruthven brought together under the auspices of the Academy of the Humanities an overview of 'the new humanities' which stressed growth, dynamism, interdisciplinarity and post-humanism and saw publication as Beyond the Disciplines: The new humanities (Ruthven 1992).

This time, the debate is different.

This time the broad context is the relation of the humanities and creative arts to the innovation agenda and the knowledge economy. It is about the humanities and the creative arts, a crucial but little thought-through connection that is assuming centre stage for reasons that are the burden of this paper but also, and relatedly, because of the growth and integration of creative arts courses and staff into the university system over the last decade.

It's not, then, a debate about the humanities and creative arts as the ding an sich - the imponderable thing in itself. The current debate is empirical, it's evidence-based, and it's about a wider set of issues about the new knowledge economy that humanists and creatives are joining, not initiating amongst ourselves.

My discussion follows these lines:

• What's wrong with the standard innovation and R∓D agendas in a knowledge-based economy?
• Why should the humanities and creative arts disciplines be in innovation and R∓D agendas?
• How innovation and R&D policies are evolving that show a way ahead.

 

Professor Stuart Cunningham
2004

 

 

For more information, please contact:

Toss Gascoigne

Executive Director

Council of the Humanties, Arts and Social Sciences

Phone: +61 2 6201 2740

director [at] chass.org.au