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The Flying University of Transnational Humanities (FUTH) is an annual summer school and year-round online forum for researchers and graduate students from all over the world interested in the transnational paradigm of humanistic inquiry.
The Flying University takes its name and immediate inspiration from Poland’s Flying University, a roaming educational enterprise which offered post-secondary education outside the remit of state control and government censorship. FUTH is particularly concerned with developing critical understandings that are resistant to the ideological and ideational hegemony of the nation-state and the epistemological and hermeneutic conventions that support it. This does not mean that FUTH seeks to dispense with the “national” and construct a reified “transnational” to replace it or to foster “transnationalism” as an ideological alternative to “nationalism.” FUTH aims to free our imaginations from the regime of the nation-state and to offer new ways of thinking about the political, social and cultural order of the world, both past and present.
- -Trans-cultural: FUTH will not only critically examine the production and dissemination of (trans-) national knowledge and culture, but also problematize imagined geographies of “the East” and “the West.” In so doing, we will explore times, places, and subjects as fluid and hybrid, rather than as confined and constrained by geopolitical or cultural boundaries
- - Trans-disciplinary: FUTH seeks to comprehend the complex nature of various trans-cultural issues and employ trans-disciplinary approaches. To that end, FUTH is open to scholars, educators, researchers and students from all academic specializations.
- - Trans-institutional: FUTH is an intellectual network, founded and run by a global consortium of scholars, departments, and institutions. With the support of this network, we hope to facilitate trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary collaborations.
The Flying University of Transnational Humanities is accordingly
The Flying University of Transnational Humanities is “in session” once per year for one week, and will normally be held during summer vacation. The host site changes on an annual or bi-annual basis and rotates between partner institutions. FUTH online runs year-round: through its dedicated website, a permanent online space will be provided for interactive discussions. All institutions, departments, and scholars are welcome to participate both offline and online.
Each year, FUTH will have a different cross-disciplinary theme around which the sessions will be organized. It will consist of conferences, lectures, and seminars where renowned scholars from partner and other institutions will be invited to share their ideas. The FUTH steering and advisory committees, in conjunction with faculty members of partner institutions and other specialists, will prepare lecture syllabi and reading lists. Student participants are expected to study the readings in advance of each lecture and seminar discussion. A selected number of participants will also have an opportunity to present their ongoing research. All lectures, seminars and presentations will be held in English, in principle, while the possibility of translingual practices will be explored.
For the initial three years (2010–2012), the overarching theme of FUTH will be “borders.” There have been numerous studies on how borders are constructed, negotiated, and policed and how they are simultaneously transgressed, challenged, and renegotiated. Borders are no longer seen simply as physical divisions but also as discursive practices and cultural institutions. However, the multiplicity and hybridity of borders (e.g., national, ethnic, cultural, geographical, gender, political, economic, etc), as well as their transnational scalability (e.g., local, national, supranational, global, etc), has yet to be intensively investigated. To address this gap, the first FUTH—which takes place from June 11–16, 2010, at the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea—will focus on “regions” in their multiple forms and examine them as sites of bordering practices and processes. Under the subheading of “Regions and Regionalization,” a combination of lectures, seminars, and presentation/feedback sessions—followed by a two-day conference—will encourage students to problematize the often naturalized categories of “Asia,” “Europe,” “Africa” or “Americas,” and to cultivate a deeper, more contextual understanding of the making and unmaking of regions.
