Not Another Crisis! Knowledge in and beyond disciplines

About the event

This Symposium is hosted the the Society & Culture Spotlight at the University of Warwick.

How do we ‘know’ a crisis when we see one? Does this knowledge offer potential ways forward? It is a truism that the complex challenges that define our times can only be addressed through interdisciplinary approaches. What if knowledge is not external to the crisis, but a key part of it?

While different disciplinary formations at universities and elsewhere are confronting their specific crises, from direct attacks on scientific research in authoritarian regimes globally to the increasing defunding of humanities everywhere, it is on the grounds of culture and society that these crises are unfolding with tremendous force. What impact will these crises have on cultures and societies across the world? And what may be the emergent new sources of knowledge within culture and society? Does knowledge in and of society and culture still provide a relevant perspective and source of empowerment under these conditions, and how? 

In this day-long Symposium, we seek to confront these questions so as to construct new ways of tackling knowledge in today’s university and beyond.

Themes

To explore these broad questions, we propose the following themes:

1. Crisis of the university

With diminishing state support and spiralling reliance on market forces, the university today is facing an identity crisis and increasingly relinquishing its role as providing space for critical public interventions. Does the current crisis signal its terminal decline, or can it be reinvented in ways that attend to the urgent social and political questions of our time?

2. Crisis of the disciplines 

After decades of policy and theoretical thinking about interdisciplinarity as providing an opening into new vistas of knowledge, it also seems that it has been used to mask more deep-rooted crisis of knowledge itself. With increasing talk of anti-disciplinarity, what is the role of disciplines in the future?

3. Crisis of society and culture

What role can institutions of knowledge play in responding to a generalised crisis of society and culture which is increasingly subjected to enclosures of public spaces, ecological catastrophes, and access to democratic processes?

This one-day symposium will bring together Warwick researchers and external speakers to explore the knowledge crisis today. The day will be divided into three segments, with each taking up one of the themes.

(speaker details to be added)

When: Tuesday 23 June 2026

Time: 9.30am-5.30pm

Location: Scarman Conference Centre, University of Warwick

Registration

View the programme