Mission Statement Responses
Mission Statement Responses Arjun Appadurai, Lara Deeb, Jessica Winegar, Thomas R. Trautmann, Shamil Jeppie, Tani Barlow, Faisal Devji, Deniz Kandiyoti, Steven Pierce, Udaya Kumar, Elizabeth W. Giorgis, James De Lorenzi, Leela Gandhi, Peter van der Veer Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 33, Number 2, 2013, pp. 137-139 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v033/33.2.appadurai.html Access provided by New York University (17 Jun 2014 11:41 GMT) Mission Statement Responses see this new phase in the history of a well- established scholarly journal as offering a major opportunity. That opportunity needs to be placed in a context. There are three key elements to this context, from the point of view of the American research university and the geographies of the rest of the world. IFirst, globalization has encouraged greater traffic among disciplines, regions, and institutions based primarily on growing access to information, knowledge, and methodology through the Internet and the World Wide Web. Second, and in roughly the same period, the humanities have become increasingly marginalized as a result of the rise of vocational, professional, and skill- based knowledge throughout the world. This has been tied to a deepening crisis of the research university, which has lost any clear sense of its distinctive mission. Third, there is growing tension everywhere between the claims of heritage, iden- tity, and religion and the claims of free expression, opinion, and debate. Each of these contextual factors, and their joint force, requires renewed attention to what I see as the critical humanities.
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