ON BEING CONTROVERSIAL THE HUMANITIES REACH OUT The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) will be hosting a 2 day conference on the Humanities. This conference - which will be opened by Craig Calhoun, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)- seeks to unlock the questioning spirit of the Humanities and, in doing, showcase their range and relevance for contemporary South Africa. These issues were at the heart of the opening chapter of the ASSAf Consensus Study on the Humanities that was released in August 2011. The Humanities thrive on controversy - matters of dispute in which voices differ, opinions divide, and passions inflame. These will be highlighted over the two days of the June conference. Controversy helps the Humanities to understand societal issues better: the argumentation which accompa- nies controversy also deepens the Humanities by opening them to a myriad of views and voices making them ever more appreciative of – and so relevant to - everyday life. Our immediate focus is South Africa in its twentieth year of democracy and, in selecting the issues for argu- mentation, the organisers have been at pains to select those controversies that go to the heart of several debates in our country. We will bring together artists and academics, the creative and the analytical, the conventional and the pro- vocative for a series of panels that seek to air matters of public controversy in a argumentative and chal- lenging way. These Encounters (as we have called them) are not Panels – in the orthodox academic way: instead, they will aim to destabilise, provoke and offer different perspectives in order to show the rich texture and concep- tual reach of the Humanities. Each Encounter will be themed around a question or set of questions; the speakers will be encouraged to advance differing opinions by a directed and interventionist Chair. LIVING THE WORLD, READING THE WORLD, UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD Details of the conference are as follows: Date: 26-27 June 2014 Venue: CSIR Convention Centre, PRETORIA RSVP: Kindly RSVP on or before 3 June 2014 to [email protected]. Registration for the conference is FREE and seats are limited. Keynote Speaker: Prof Craig Calhoun About the keynote speaker Craig Calhoun is Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a School Professor. Previously he was President of the Social Science Re- search Council and a Professor at North Carolina, Columbia and New York Universities. He served as a Dean and founder of the University Centrer for International Studies at UNC, and at NYU he founded the Institute of Public Knowledge. Calhoun’s research and writing have ranged across the social sciences, history and philosophy. His 2013 Tanner Lectures were entitled “The Problematic Public”. His new book, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early 19th Century So- cial Movements, was published by Chicago in 2012. In 2013, Oxford published Does Capitalism Have a Future? It is a collective project with Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, and Georgi Derluguian. Among Calhoun’s best known earlier books are Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Routledge 2007), Nationalism (Open University Press 1997), Critical Social Theory: Culture, History and the Problem of Specifici- ty (Blackwell, 1995), and Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (California1994). Calhoun has also edited several well-known collections including Rethinking Secularism, The Pub- lic Mission of the Research University, Sociology in America, Lessons of Empire, Habermas and the Public Sphere, and the new Habermas and Religion. .