HUM:Global-organised PhD course
One of the goals of our initial three-year start-up phase was to run a study programme on Global Humanities. We are happy to share that this summer we held our very first PhD course. From the 17th to 21st August, HUM:Global hosted the course Global Humanities: (Dis)ordering Worlds: Histories of (anti)modernity & disorder engaging 12 PhD Students based at universities in Denmark and Sweden for a week of intensive learning and discussions.
In all brevity, the course sought to connect geopolitical ordering attempts over the last 250 years, to the deep conceptual contestation of modernity and anti-modernity and situate these developments in a semiotic landscape leading up to our current moment of (dis)order, by decentring “watershed” moments of reordering in a typical westcentric chronology (1815, 1918, 1945, 1989).
We were blessed to be joined by three excellent instructors, Ravinder Kaur (ToRS - Institut for Tværkulturelle og Regionale Studier), Ozan Ozavci (Utrecht University) and Frank Gerits(Utrecht University), alongside the co-ordinators Georg Wink (Engerom, UCPH) and Haakon A. Ikonomou (Saxo, UCPH). Part of the course was also a guided tour and discussion at UN City Copenhagen, where Noa Valentin Katz Søgaard (Head of UN City Communications) shared his knowledge and took questions from the PhD students.
The last day of the course was devoted to essay ideas, where the participants presented first pitches for what will eventually be a series of blog posts which we shall publish both here on LinkedIn and on our website during the fall semester.
It was a thought-provoking week and - we hope - the first of many HUM:Global-organised PhD-courses.