The Public Mission of the Social Sciences and Humanities - Transformation and Renewal

Many academic disciplines, especially in the United States, have undergone an enormous professionalization and internal differentiation. Scholarly communication became increasingly self-referential, highly disconnected from the broader public sphere. Large segments of academics lost their previously strong ties to non-academic groups (disembedding). This process, however, has not simply been linear and uniform across disciplines and regions - nor is this trend irreversible. This conference and the larger initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere seek to establish a more nuanced picture of the historical transformations of the public role of the social sciences and humanities, looking at the manifold interdisciplinary and transatlantic variations.
The Transatlantic Conference is sponsored by the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), the Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences (BGSS) at Humboldt University, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) at New York University (NYU).

Information:
http://www.wzb.eu/sites/default/files/veranstaltungen/programmtransatlanticconferencenet.pdf