The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network
How does technology mediate what it means to be human? How have scientific, intellectual, and artistic experiments reshaped human experience in diverse historical and cultural contexts, and how might they shape our shared futures?
Rethinking the humanities in the light of changing technologies, our increasingly connected planet, the ongoing ecological crisis, and the need to create more inclusive institutions.
Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) is an OSUN-funded initiative headquartered at the Experimental Humanities Center at Bard, NY.
EHCN supports the development of innovative pedagogy, interdisciplinary research, and public engagement via digital, analog, and conceptual methods to build more just technological realities. At each partner institution, this collaboration fosters critical reflection, social justice, and practice-rich learning; digital and face-to-face public projects; and truly integrated interdisciplinary research that draws on history, theory, and experimental practice.
Global / Local Projects
EHCN insists on the power of grassroots leadership, and invites an array of collaborators to the table. Its courageous—and often playful—experimentation with both “old” and “new” technologies flattens hierarchies not just between academic disciplines but between the academy and local communities. Not only working with each partner institution to emphasize its unique local technological, environmental, and cultural ecology, EHCN also creates opportunities for partners to share the lessons of their distinctive experiences with a larger global community.
EHCN at CEU
In CEU, the EHCN is mandated to support faculty, students, researchers and staff for their innovative ideas and project proposals that chart new ways of using technologies and experimentation in engaging with Humanities in a meaningful way. The idea of 'experimentation' is central to the project and the concept and idea can be realized through the development of a course, a skill-based workshop or through a community-facing event. EHCN also would like to create a common ground in the CEU community between faculty, students, and staff through a creative synergy of individual talents, interests, academic backgrounds, and mentorship by a faculty. We hope to pave the way for a Laboratory in the long run where new media, technologies, and human values will create a discourse bridging the domains of social sciences and sciences through a vigorous and topical engagement with arts and humanities.
Online Event - Zoom link
Join the launch of "(in) between worlds/ entre mundos," an audio-visual project that reflects on Latin American women’s experiences of crossing borders. The project is supported by the OSUN Civic Engagement Microgrant at Central European University and the EHCN Student-led Initiatives Grant.
"(in) between worlds/entre mundos" is an audio-visual project that aims to co-create a safe space for migrant, Latina, self-identifying women in Vienna. It is led by Loren Sandoval Arteaga, a Mexican MA student in Women's and Gender Studies at Central European University and the University of York, living in Europe since 2017 and Madár, a Brazilian interdisciplinary researcher and multimedia artist, living in Europe since 2018. Through a series of podcasts and photographs, this project hopes to reflect upon the collective experience of crossing borders (both physical and psychological) and foster the exchange of experiences and emotions connected to transition journeys and migration narratives.
The speakers will discuss the birth of the project and the theoretical and methodological approaches framing it. They will also reflect on some of its challenges and present some of the resulting audio-visual material. At the end of the event, there will also be an opportunity to ask questions and engage with the speakers.
● How do we teach responsibly and critically with generative AI?
● Why has generative AI become ubiquitous, and what future developments can we expect?
The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network is offering an online workshop on Generative AI and Experimental Pedagogy, open to all teachers and administrators across the OSUN network. The goal of the workshop is to address the recent boom in generative AI tools and models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, and its implication for university pedagogy and research.
QS-B505 or online
Video Games & Autoethnography EHCN Participatory Experimental Research Workshop
This is a 3-day workshop about using autoethnography to study video games. If you’re a videogame enthusiast, you can incorporate them into your academic work from a huge variety of perspectives, across disciplines and using many different methods. Autoethnography is a qualitative research methodology that involves examining personal experiences and cultural contexts in order to gain insights into cultural phenomena – which is very useful for game studies. This workshop aims to familiarize the participants with some of the key issues in game studies and autoethnographic research, then engage in hands-on learning, practising the skills in question.
Open to all, hybrid format available. No prior knowledge required.
Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScktsIgD8jGO2U3z4XQ7tB-aQ-D5c2vw_oQ3SqJXUnSl-YEpQ/viewform
Jerzy Jarniewicz is a Polish poet, literary critic, translator and essayist. His latest poetry collection, Mondo Cane, won the 2022 Nike Award, the most prestigious distinction in Polish literature.
This event will focus on the role of Love Poetry in our age of discontent. Do love poems still have relevance? How has love poetry changed throughout the ages? Can it surpass and survive crippling binaries, patriarchy, colonialism, or AI?
In conversation with Borbála Faragó, the poet will offer his views on these issues and will also read from his poems.
Reception to follow!
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Workshop series: Collaborative Manifesto for Experimental Humanities at CEU
The Department of Gender Studies and the CEU-OSUN Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) are pleased to invite you to three workshops devoted to creating a Collaborative Manifesto for Experimental Humanities at CEU (read more here).
The first workshop will be concerned with discussing the broad scope of the humanities in society, academia and contemporary activism(s).
The second will be devoted to creating a Vision Statement for the humanities at CEU.
The while the final workshop focuses on the pragmatic goal sketching out the courses, events and interventions that can be developed under the aegis of CEU-EHCN.
These workshops will be held in hybrid format at the CEU’s Quellenstraße campus on the following days:
Dates and Times
May 8 1330-1510 (A420)
May 15 1330-1510 (A211)
May 24 1330-1510 (A211)
For those joining us online, here is the Zoom link:
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/3339270353?pwd=alBJalQvSEdrNzlHYW5nbjY5YjJhQT09
Meeting ID: 333 927 0353
Passcode: 704893
A Reading Group at CEU
Next meeting: March 21, 2023 at 5.30PM in B215
Feel free to drop in, no RSVP required!
Would you like to spend some quality time with poems? Would you like to read poetry that unsettles, provokes, questions, opens up the senses, makes you feel more alive and more in touch with being human?
In this group we take the slow approach to poetry, spending as much time as we need to discover an individual poem’s social, political or personal message. Centered around a theme there will be a collection of contemporary and modern poems to read in advance of every meeting.
The close readings are guided by Borbála Faragó from the Center for Academic Writing, whose academic research is in poetry criticism.
Call for Participation | Pelion Summer Lab 2023 “Eco/o/ontologies”
This summer the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) will co-host the 5th Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities (PSL), an initiative of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly, on June 28 -August 7.
The aim of this 10-day program is to convene an interdisciplinary group of graduate students, researchers, artists, activists, and cultural producers from fields such as anthropology, history, sociology, interdisciplinary arts, gender studies, cultural and new media studies to collaborate on an intensive exchange and exploration of current pressing global problems.
Read more and apply here.
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Types of Funding:
3) Skills-based Workshops (up to 1500 USD): Eligibility: CEU faculty/staff/students
4) Student Research and Professional Opportunities (up to 1000 USD): Eligibility: CEU students
Criteria for Applications:
The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network promotes projects that encourage the following:
1. Critical reflection on the intersection of science, technology, media, art, and the humanities in response to the question: how does technology mediate what it means to be human?
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Check out the promotional video from May 2021 explaining the EHCN-local grants opportunity: https://youtu.be/7V7DxrPVc20
- CEU Virtual Ecovillage - Olea Morris
- Listening as Doorways to Futures - Julian Willming
- Public History - Jefferson R. Mendez
- Restaging Memories of Dissents: #ENDSARS in Retrospect - Oluwafunmilayo Miriam Akinpelu
- Third Country National Discrimination - Luka Gotsiridze
- Visual Civic Literacy - Iurii Rudnev and Elizaveta Berezina
Additional partners include: Hampton University, USA; Recovering Voices, Smithsonian Institution, USA; and University of Thessaly, Greece.