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The very idea of academic culture: What academy? What culture?

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Human Affairs

Abstract

In what senses can the academy be said to be a site of culture? Does that very idea bear much weight today? Perhaps the negative proposition has more substance, namely that the academy is no longer (if indeed it ever was) a place of culture. After all, we live in dark times-of unbridled power, tyranny, domination and manipulation. Some say that we have entered an age of the posthuman or even the inhuman. It just may be, however, that in such a world, the academic community is needed more than ever for it offers a culture of justified revelation. It is a culture that reveals the world to us in new ways, but in ways that are attested and contested; its judgements emerge out of a critical and unworldly pedantry. With some hesitancy, we can legitimately therefore speak of not just a culture of the academic community but, indeed, the culture of the academic community.

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Correspondence to Ronald Barnett.

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Barnett, R. The very idea of academic culture: What academy? What culture?. Humaff 24, 7–19 (2014). https://doi.org/10.2478/s13374-014-0202-4

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