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Knowledge/Culture Series

The Knowledge/Culture series is a sequence of international conferences hosted by the Institute for Culture and Society in collaboration with our partners. Each conference focuses on a pressing issue or salient theme in the world – for example, social change, economy, globalisation. The dual motifs of knowledge and culture frame each conference.

To know is more than to accumulate information or data. To talk of culture is to emphasise the practices, discourses, and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held-in-common. Taken together these two motifs suggest an engaged and interpretative approach to the world.

The human condition is undergoing rapid change. Uncertainty and precarity seem to prevail. If we are going to remake our world in positive ways we need to use all our ways of knowing. This conference series aims to outline ways in which we could work together better across knowledge boundaries, share understandings, navigate complexity, and develop new frameworks for interpreting and acting in our world.

Previous keynote speakers in the series have included Ien Ang, Dipesh Chakrabarty Chris Gibson, Katherine Gibson, Penny Harvey, Lesley Head, Paul James, Bruno Latour, Timothy Mitchell, Aihwa Ong, Nikolas Rose, Nguyen Van Suu, Wendy Hui Kyong Hun, Orit Halpern, Jennifer Gabrys and Felix Stalder.

Other speakers have come from places as diverse as Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Jamaica, Korea, India, Japan, and Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Philippines, South Africa, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, United States, and Vietnam.

The series so far includes these conferences: