Radical Humanities Laboratory

What is the Radical Humanities Laboratory?

The Radical Humanities Laboratory is a groundbreaking initiative launched by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation and the College of the Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences. A special recruitment of internationally renowned, cutting-edge scholars in the Humanities were brought together to synergise and dynamise how the humanities might lead the research of the Future.

Environmental destruction, catastrophic inequality, persistent gender discrimination and racisms, ongoing colonial rule, war, pandemics, digital mass manipulation... Ours is an epoch of violence and apparent breakdown, with long term sources. But it is also an era of unexpected conjunctures and new possibilities. Statues have fallen and new movements have shaken the foundations of contemporary politics, economics and society. Technological change and transformations disorient all stable reference points. Science and the Arts are no longer two cultures, but intertwined fields that take strange, new and hybrid forms.

What forms of thought and action can meet such a moment? To be radical is to grasp things by the root. The Radical Humanities Laboratory will open a space for post- and anti- disciplinary practices across the university's four colleges. It will put critical and experimental work from the Humanities at the heart of fundamental research addressing the causes and consequences of the present: on how it can be understood, changed, and how it can be seen or lived differently, as new trajectories emerge. It builds on a sense of place; the clear view from a periphery within a periphery; the possibilities of an island. 

We welcome scholars, scientists, artists, activists, archivists, change-agents, and disrupters in Cork, in Ireland, and beyond, to engage with us in conversation about the roots of our present crises, and the alternate futures that might yet grow from them.