1st Global Conference: Intellectuals - Knowledge, Power, Ideas

Budapest, Hungary

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to explore the role, character, nature and place of intellectuals and intellectual work in contemporary society. Whilst the 'intellectual' emerges as a particular category with the development of modernity, the 'knowledgeable' and knowledge producers have been an important historical agent and social actor since the early Greek philosophers, and knowledge production, whether religious, scientific or philosophical, has been important in shaping social, political, economic and cultural change. Intellectuals and the knowledge they produce have been subject to competing representations: from an 'elect' producing knowledge for its own sake to different forms of philosopher king, servant of the state or dissenting movement intellectuals connecting politically with change in the social world. In contemporary 'knowledge' societies, much of the focus on the intellectual as a 'public' figure, residing within the media intelligentsia or institutions of higher learning, but competing theories of intellectuals and their work identify elitist, meritocratic and radical alternatives about who intellectuals are, what they do, how they are connected to and divided from other social institutions, and why we understand them the way we do.

The Project underpinning this inaugural conference seeks to build both an evidenced and critical understanding of the intellectual and intellectual work in the past and a critical understanding of intellectuals and intellectual work in the present, and its prospects for the future. In doing so, it recognises that the interdisciplinary basis of such an analysis will take in the fields of cultural studies, education studies (with a particular focus on higher education), history, literature, philosophy, politics, sociology, social theory and open avenues to wider and more diverse disciplinary connections, and the project welcomes interdisciplinary explorations.

Full Conference Description