humanities assignment help australia

humanities assignment help australia

Exploring the Impact and Relevance of Humanities in Contemporary Australian Society

1. Introduction to Humanities and its Significance

Society that tolerates discrimination, victimisation, bullying, and harassment is deemed immoral, if not illegal. Moral philosophy and the dilemmas it throws up pose pressing questions for contemporary Australians, grappling with issues of who belongs in this country and how they should be received. From Cate Blanchett’s public polemics on the government’s immigration policies to David Malouf’s poetry of place, humanities research achieves broad impact and speaks deeply to constituent human emotions such as a sense of loss, fear of progress to the potential for redemption. Humanities Australia will bring you stories of the significant impact and engagement happening across our community.

Despite efforts to characterise and justify it, humanities’ specific role in and for modern Australian society remains under-examined. In 2015, The Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) commissioned market research to explore attitudes and motivations for humanities study for high school students, current undergraduates and decision makers in the university sector, and the education and employment sectors. The market research report concluded that the perceived benefits of a degree for the individual were both tangible and not unique to humanities. The perceived benefits for the broader society of studying the humanities were strongly linked to the future cultural and intellectual capital that would be provided by the students of today and the future, reflected in students who could flourish as multidisciplinary, creative, critical thinkers and problem solvers.

2. Historical Development of Humanities in Australia

Within the even more elite decision-making area of humanities, decisions made about what to include in the marketable ‘core curriculum’ were often simultaneously commercially astute and idealist. Ongoing debates about what exactly students should take in their ‘breadth’ study have always been the site of philosophical, and even occasionally religious, disputes. Many renowned critics and reformers of the Australian higher education system have added to the public discussion of ‘dumbing down’ within the Australian university system and the prevailing lack of respect for the arts generally since they were so exposed to the overtures of policy debates that were as rich in pragmatic rational detail as they were devoid of strategic questions or educational philosophy.

By the post-Second World War period, in the light of wartime experiences such as the loss of culture at Gallipoli and the defeat of the European democracies, humanities were maintained as an interesting pattern of study and, of course, adapting such studies to the purpose of a combative culture. Humanities benefited from ‘colonial cringe’, i.e. the British apartheid system. Beautiful buildings, Gothic quadrangles, a residence system, and the home of neat sports such as cricket and boating confirmed that a ‘proper degree’ was safely housed in the hands of a tiny elite.

In Australia in the late nineteenth century, educational reformers such as George Arnold Wood asked many questions about the educational nature of the curriculum, and innovation in local curricula was characterized by the educational and social goals local reformers were invited to articulate. In the early twentieth century, the new research universities were determined to secure a profile, usually in medicine and the sciences, and often based on the best German models. It took them some time to establish a well-recognized research profile, and part of the way to do so was by founding a school of ‘philosophy’ and a school of ‘Philosophy, Language, and General Studies’.

Humanities has a rich and complex history within Australian education. At the confluence of philosophical, sociological, and educational change, the Australian version of ‘humanities’ was always in a dynamic and productive relationship with its enthusiasts and founders. Humanities subjects from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century testify to an international respect for non-vocational knowledge and the intense debate gathered around the question of what this knowledge should consist of.

3. Key Disciplines and Fields within the Humanities

– Arts, Drama, and Film Studies: visual arts; music (including musicology, ethnomusicology, music composition, and performance); various other creative and performing arts practice and theory, including media, design, and fashion; theatre and dance; the built environment: architecture, urban design, and physical planning. – English-language and comparative literature: study of a range of world literatures and the scholarly and critical study of literature that is written in or translated into English. – Literary Theory: literary theory may form background studies to English departments or may exist independently as programs, specializations, or departments. – Philosophy: primarily ethical, metaphysical, or aesthetic topics, although some also focus on the intersection of philosophy and literature or art. – Religion and Theology: religious studies and theology offer ways and approaches for understanding the religions and spiritualities that characterize our shared humanity, as well as examining smaller religious and spiritual traditions, especially those emerging in local or indigenous contexts. Classically, in the Scholastic tradition, theology was viewed as queen of all disciplines. – History: socio-political systems, human behavior, political discourses, biography, identity studies: gender, race, sexuality, class, the citizen, social futures, indigenous ways and identities, and metaphors of identity, history of third world colonization and equality, holocaust and history of war, environmental history.

The academic discipline known as humanities, or the arts and humanities, is the branch of knowledge that explores the nature, creation, application, and implications of human knowledge, culture, and society. Humanities disciplines are often loosely distinguished from the biological, physical, social, and applied sciences, focusing as they do upon human experiences, cultural creation, expressions of emotion and self, and creative writing more so than quantifiable or verifiable data. While Australian Government education funding is often divided up into subdisciplines of humanities, the broad fields recognized as part of humanities or the arts and humanities include:

4. Case Studies: Applications of Humanities in Australian Contexts

1. Language and public policy – Social research on language usage is an important part of shaping public policy. Socio-legal research on language use informs policy about how police advise people of their rights, and specialists in deaf communication and socio-medical research have contributed knowledge and expertise to a new government-funded centre that is working to improve healthcare and well-being among the deaf and hard-of-hearing community in Australia. School of humanities-based research was crucial in showing that teaching Auslan (Australian Sign Language) to parents of deaf children was a sound policy, and the Federal Government has allocated money to a national cooperative of state Deaf societies, Hello! To train Auslan interpreters for these parenting-deaf child courses. Our research into Auslan and signed language communication has also been used for public education as part of the National Week of Deaf People, and also to demonstrate what good language provision should look like in schools. Other work in our school on disability and linguistics is setting the international trend in the development of disability theory as it engages with questions of language.

Science and technology, combined with the insights gained from the humanities, can play a role that is crucial for imagining new possibilities for the workplace and for driving strategies and goals overseas. The practical applications of the humanities are being identified all the time, in diverse fields and sectors. Below are three such case studies that examine the applications of humanities in Australian contexts. Through this report, we seek to give students and the general public a sense of the range of work being conducted in both the academy and outside of it.

5. Challenges and Opportunities for Humanities in Australia

It is clear that students of the first millennium US study literature, listen to music inspired by myths, legends and histories of Greece and Rome, and play war games in which classical histories determine the character of the play; public personalities use a tiny smattering of Greek and Roman history and philosophy; athletes aspire to be like the ancient Greek runners and horse-owners; and those supporting a particular view of the appropriate outcomes for Australian higher education publish materials about the linguistic and conceptual tools for sociopolitical analysis that Australians once acquired and the intellectual erosion that has hence followed their discontinuation. At the same time, the future for the humanities and, particularly, for the area of study referred to here, is not so self-evident. The humanities are not, for example, government or industry priorities for investment and support. Instead, funding body after funding body reports the belief of much of the Australian public and media that the value of degrees in such areas is less, not greater, than that of alternatives in law, medicine, technology, management and so on. Some version of the threat to conformity which is being read into this is reported in numerous recruitment sector reports discussing the “challenges of an aging workforce and a retiring humanist pool”.

The questions of how the humanities are being used in and by the people of contemporary Australian society and of the implications of these uses for the shape and future directions of classical studies in Australia should, in some ways, have fairly straightforward answers. The broad uses to which Australians put the knowledge, skills and conceptual tools traditionally acquired in the course of studying the ancient world are described by the work of professionals in the area, industry reports into the Australian workforce, and direct contact by many consumers of the disciplines with employers and other recruiters.