Review of Ph.D Studies in Humanities: Updating New Horizons in Education

Anne Kristiina Kurjenoja,Ileana Azor Hernandez

doi:10.4172/2469-6676.100167

Abstract

The context of information society, technological development and new societal challenges demands new frameworks for critical analysis of the knowledge production as well as for the geopolitical democratization of their distribution. In our article “Cultural processes, social change and new horizons in education,” published in Procedia. Social and Behavioral Sciences, 174, we presented the educational development work done in the Doctorate in Creation and Culture Studies of the Universidad de las Americas Puebla (UDLAP), Mexico, in order to face the contemporary demands for understanding and studying processes of knowledge construction, transmission and diffusion beyond the academic standards of use and epistemologies of text. This focus has been especially important for the program, as it is based on the collaboration on the transdisciplinary basis between Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences, having some extensions to ITC engineering and Natural Sciences through its research projects and creative practices. This text is a review of the above-mentioned article but also an updating of that program presentation due to the recent curriculum renovation and with it, integration of new research foci.

Highlights

One of the characteristics of the new Ph.D. programs in humanities has been their trend to widen the Eurocentric shallow sense of history, seeking for knowledges sprung from the unseen roots of the Others forgotten by the historical amnesia of the Western universities [1,2]
In the case of high level research, knowledge production and doctoral education, challenges we are continuously facing are complex, beginning with the need to understand the social tendencies of the contexts in which we are working as well as the usability and impact of the produced knowledge in the contemporary societies and how new forms of knowledge production should be inserted to institutionalized structures such as universities
In order to contribute to the alternative practices in knowledge production in communities of emergent economies such as Mexico, since 2006 the Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP) has offered a transdisciplinary doctorate program in Creation and Culture Studies with the participation of a wide range of researchers from art, architecture and urban studies to anthropology, political sciences and psychology

Summary

Introduction

One of the characteristics of the new Ph.D. programs in humanities has been their trend to widen the Eurocentric shallow sense of history, seeking for knowledges sprung from the unseen roots of the Others forgotten by the historical amnesia of the Western universities [1,2]. The cooperation between researchers, creators and communities in terms of recollection, analysis and study of alternative knowledge production requires a special kind of creativity and sensibility able to capture meanings and individual and collective manifestations as these present forms beyond the canonical validation of knowledge by cultural norms These hybrid, sensuous and critically reflective cultural forms demand new, innovative research initiatives that challenge the current stiff university system demanding substantial changes in the traditional role of research and education in humanities; for example, Belonging Bologna-seminar report [5] emphasizes that art, design and culture education and research should always be connected to and reflecting the events of the outside world [1]. The analysis of cultural production has been exceeded by modes of action, thinking and feeling not known before; the wideness and velocity of the cybernetic web, the scope of technology of mass media and the human environment manipulated by commercial strategies and the recent collapse of paradigms that until today had given form to the individual and to the collective creativity and innovation, demands for a formation of researchers and creators who are able to respond and give consistence to our time proposing spaces for cultural dialogue and critique and new forms for creative knowledge production and transmission [6]

Program Updates and Renewed Research Lines

Conclusion