blog: Sustainable development and humanities

Sustainability is no doubt one of the key issues in our field. You may be interested in having a look at a Methods Network report on these issues:
http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/redist/pdf/es7report.pdf

I would be interested to hear more about your ideas regarding sustainable development - I you happen to have any materials from your presentation left, feel free to publish them here. This site may not be for eternity, but it should be around for quite a while...
--
Torsten Reimer
http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk

Here is the abstract of the paper for the meeting in Birmingham:

Much of the discussion on sustainable development has been dominated by a scientfic approach to topics such as climate change, global warming, and business oriented approaches such as corporate sustainability, triple bottom lines, and such neologisms.
I would like to argue instead for an approach based on the concepts of the humanists, and suggest that the humanities have a contribution to make to the debate on international development.
This means we need to identify the concepts now available within the debate on sustainable development, and track their methods and approaches. This is essentially a matter of knowledge organisation. We might call it phKO.
The silos of academia we have known at least since the paper of A.F.Blunt in 1938 at the 14th Congress of FID, the Federation International Documentation, entitled A Method for Documentation in the Humanties, cause facts to prevent the understanding of whole epochs, including this one.
The paper will start from Blunt's, and move us swiftly on to 2007, outlining what we know about knowledge organisation for sustainable development from the viewpoint, or vision, of a deeply scratched humanist perspective.
The policy issues for the Higher Education Academy will be outlined, as well as how the people involved in teaching, learning, researching, e-duce-ating with fields included in the humanities might move forward strategies for sustainable development in their organisations and subject discipline institutions.

And here is the paper, written up: the title might take a little working out, but the first test on it afterwards, JSTOR failed.

Pope Harley

{20.10 Arrive home. I wouldn't even have left Crewe yet.

19.40 Waterloo. The train to Basingstoke is to be the front four coaches. pass full coaches with not in service sign, reach the front four, going off empty. Eight carriage reduced to four. No one knows why. Apologise. Woman stands on my foot. Apologise.

17.10. Decide to abandon plan to catch the 20.31 at Crewe which would have been the 19.47 from Liverpool, and buy ticket to London. Train, in back five carriages completely packed, the front four, first class, carriages, completely empty. No seat reservation, as change of plan.

16.00 Bus stop in the dark so I can't tell from the timetable where any of the buses go, as a 44 with City Centre zooms up, takes £1.0, exact change, which seems a strange concept, but I have, then passes the building we had been in before I had started the walk, then takes about an hour to get to New Street, with me in enxiety about stops and places, unlike the morning taxi which had taken 10 minutes for £5.60.

08.00 Hotel has failed to give me wake-up call so miss breakfast to catch 08.19 from Liverpool to Birmingham. Leave New St. and no idea where I am, or where bus might be, but taxi weaves through traffic jamb and roundabouts not moving to deposit me in part of a Capability Brown Landscape Garden now called Birmingham University Conference Centre, divided by a hedge from the lake.}

HumanITarian SustainabilITy

Let me put up five stickers on the flipchart.

Design activism

Humanities

IS::KO

Sustainable development

Education

Design Activism might be a type of knewlogo in the Higher Education Academy community arguing the academy is a role in the community, engaged, participative, action, which I learned from von Koeningsberger at the DPU, UCL.

The Humanities is a knewer invention, there isn't a HEA centre and I remain puzzled at its re-emergence, but happy for it seems to me that the humanities, humanists, humanitarians, humanism, is one of the characteristics of what I would like to call civilisaiton. The meeting is organised by the History, Classics, Archeology Subject Centre, based in the University of Liverpool. What else is there to the humanities? I had approached a book by the Open University called Form and Reading which is block 1 introduction to a course in the humanities to find out. The Warburg, the continuation of the classical tradition, and a Blunt Dialectic, based on a paper of 1938 I had used in the abstract to my contribution.

IS::KO needs a little more explanation.

Since the 1970s I have called myself an information systems designer, but no one knows what that means. At some point information science committed suicide. Knowledge Organisation has a journal. so I have joined them together, how does Information Systems and Knowledge Organisation map?

Sustainable Development is rather more obvious, this is the point of the meeting, and the argument of my presentation. Why HEFCE and HEA has become involved is more puzzling, but I have been in this for a long time.

Education seems more obvious, that is what education is supposed to be about, but suppose what we actually have is Leisure Class Theory, (Veblen), One Dimensional Man, (Marcuse), the Dominant Ideas of the Ruling Class (DIRC) and people making history in conditions not of their own making (Marx)?

[Imagine a Pope arrives in the Phillipines, gets off a plane, kneels and kisses the ground, and papparazzi surround him and ask what he thinks of human rights in the Philipines? Isn't that a perfectly reasonable question? Shouldn't he have thought of the answer, decided before he mounted the plane?]

Human Rights might be one of our starting points on the contribution of the humanities to sustainable development.

When the Athenian Democracy sacked Melos, there wasn't a human rifghts agenda? When Blunt wrote of a method of documentation for the humanities, we don't know whether he had a concept of human rights, but by 1948 we have a UN declaration.

These ideas have come from somewhere.

Forty years later, when Brundtland proposes a scheme for sustainable development, a proper response is never mind the future, what about my children now. This makes sustainable development apartheid?

So our humanities have to include history, politics, philosophy, and knowledge organisation, phKO.

Rights is one of these. Private rights, property, human happiness. Public rights? Access? Open? Gated estates?

Property right and cultural diversity.

WSIS

The World Summit on the Information Society was possiblty the last of the summits, following those on Sustainable Development which saw government and civil society debating the idea of public goods of the global commons.

I( had been involved in the Paris Prep-Com on behalf of the British Computer Society in which I had argued, following the White Paper on Globalisation and Development of Claire Short, for the idea of the inter-operability of metadata as an international public good. The Higher Education Academy involvement is the support of the metadata working party.

This case I used in an electronic governance module during the whole period of preparation through to the production of the final strategy and action plan. Using UNESCO as the engine to get the strategy into the necessary papers has presented us with an interesting issue: is the success of stopping the enemy been the cause of the failure of the process?

OU

My second case was in preparation for this meeting.

I took two pages from the Block 1 of the first course in the Humanities of the Open University, a book called Form and Reading and gave it to a module in the final year of a faculty of CISM (computing, information systems and mathematics) at Kingston University to see what they thought they could add as value through what they knew.

The module isn't yet complete so we don't know where this will go, but some interesting slides from Humanities to arts, literature, music, philosophy, then to paintings and poems with no recognition of the role of sustainable development or new information and communication technology would be par?

Edgebaston(sic)

The third case is during the meeting, as is always the case.

The landscape here is Capability Brown through the filter of a golf course and university building, more proceeding around.

There are no connections between the buildings of the university except for a road carrying 50 cars a minute at fifty miles an hour, with sections of no pavement, which mean frequent crossings. In several places students have done green transport planning, tearing down fences and making paths, but there is no sign of an appreciation of the work of art, or even a recognition that it exists or ever existed. One path leads into a huge compost heap.

There is nothing on the access leaflet of the University of the whereabouts of the bus stops, or the buses which run, about par for the course again. I could have made a series of photographs of these opportunities but have more than enough already. It is only presumably when some students are killed that something might happen? But there is no chance of recovering the landscape Brownian.

[Robert Harley's descendants have deposited some more papers in the British Library in bad condition so someone goes to look at them, agrees they are in bad condition so the Superintendent will ensure that no one other than him will ever see them? Thus there is no point in citing, or using? Ethics?]

1713

Bobbitt in the Shield of Achilles takes the tale from then til now presumably to justify his paymasters' policy?

This seemed to me to need a response, so I assembled the Choice of Hercules which has had several outstilations, including the HEA meeting on digital literacy, which is like sustainable literacy.

One of my moments, and Bobbitts is the Treaty of Utrecht.

This revolves around Harvey, Bolingbroke, and how close came a Jacobean restoration?

It hangs too around the ethics of who told whom who to not support. And not to tell.

Shaftesbury, Ashley-Cooper perhaps learned the most from this? Addison something, Pope I wonder what? Hervey?

And this begat the English Landscape Garden.

As well as Windsor Park.

Conclusion

The tyranny of the subject in higher education presents us with the matter of sustainable development, the humanities, as well as the development of new information and communication technologies.

This was the matter raised by Blunt in his paper in 1938, and we have made no progress.

He wasn't concerned though how students learn from their environment the real policies, principles, values, methods of society, those they learn from parking.

How we work out cases, modules, for research, learning, teaching, sustainable development and the humanities in a world of leisure class theory for one dimensional man will continue to provide us with opportunities to stretch our multi-diensionality and our semantic distances beyond YML.

Glossary

Blunt Dialectic

Choice of Hercules

Pope Harvey

YML

The glossary will provide tags and so far, we haven't started Pope Harvey

John Lindsay
Reader in Information Systems Design
Kingston University
Kingston Upon Thames