Beyond Secularization
Religion, Science and Technology in Public Life
Workshops & Conferences
Progress and the Figure of the Human: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into the Human Sciences
October 27-29, 2021
The time is ripe for reexamining the figure of the human in contemporary human/social sciences (see Background Rationale below). To that end, this workshop will ask: what are the vectors, concepts, and practices through which the human sciences think the human and closely associated concepts of self and person? What are the figures of the human at play in the various human/social sciences, particularly with respect to the relation between “these humans here” and the collective category of “humanity”? What is at stake—empirically, analytically and normatively—in the theoretical and methodological adoption particular figures of human, self and person, and their relations? And, in particular, how are ways of imagining the human bound up with assumptions about—and critiques of—notions of progress? The workshop will convene a group of leading scholars in the human sciences to examine conceptions/definitions of “the human” at play in their respective fields.
Enlightenment Beyond Secularization
To be announced, 2022
Organized around the question What is progress, and how do we know? this international conference will draw upon the project’s insights about the ways knowledge and ideas of progress are mutually configured to consider: how must the project of enlightenment, long associated with an imperative of secularization, be re-imagined in this post-secular moment; and, in light of a deepened understanding of the relations among religion, science and technology in contemporary public life, what is required to move beyond the imaginary that has disciplined and configured imaginations of those relations?
Disenchantments Enchantments: A Century of Science as a Vocation
November 16-17, 2017
Download a full copy of the workshop booklet below
