| Agenda of the conferenceDownload | Among speakers of the conference — scholars and higher education practitioners from Lithuania and Belarus, USA, Bulgaria, Russia, Croatia, Kyrgyzstan, and others. The conference starts on June 11 at 4 pm and takes place at the EHU Campus Auditorium 110.
Contact person: Maria Laktionkina, Academic Department of Humanities and Arts (maria.laktionkina@ehu.lt). |
The first quarter of the twenty-first century is confronted with unprecedented challenges not always met by our ability of successively responding to them. It appears that our previous expectations to leave behind the tragic experience of the twentieth century proved as very naïve. The present globalizing world is engaged in combatting poverty, terrorism, climate change, migration, populism, and radicalism, etc.
However, one of the major factors affecting our lives is the advancement of technology. While technology improves our lives by making hard things easier it has, as an inevitable effect, the tendency of flattering out our lives with the subsequent loss of the ability of understanding ourselves. The appropriate response to this danger is not to oppose or reject technology, but to find a way of escaping the temptation to rely on it in our inevitable search for a meaningful life.
Vast scientific efforts are devoted to the exploration of various aspects of human being – anthropology, psychology, political science, sociology, history, and other specialized sciences.
Yet, any specialized study of man tends to look upon the totality of the person from the point of view of a particular function and contributes to increasing atomization of our knowledge of humans. In addition, the way of addressing the reality of human being is too much dominated by the paradigm of the natural sciences with its principles of objectification and countability.
As a result, mechanistic thinking subjugates our lives and human being and shrinks them to a nodal point of conventional reactions and functions.
Particularly troublesome consequences have these developments on humanities education as far as its main aim is concentrated on transmitting basic values of culture and making humans prepared for challenges of the present world. Lastly, it is crucial to highlight that the current danger of the fact that in the scientifically technological world the very way we are encountering ourselves is dominated by technological utilization of things. This and many other aspects of the radical transformation of humanities education in the age of technology will be discussed during the conference.