This Annual conference at Columbia University is close to what we are talking about:


Rethinking the Human Sciences

Each year the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society hosts an annual conference that brings together the finest scholars in the world to discuss issues of historical and contemporary relevance, joining the reading practices of comparative literary studies to those of the social theoretical disciplines. 

The generally cultivated skepticism about the contemporary pertinence of humanities-based education to current problems in social achievement and capacity to compete in a global sphere has energized the ranks of the Institute to seek new venues of re-conceptualizing and re-articulating the human sciences. 

Indeed, the point is to rethink the humanities in broader fashion in order to address, not merely modes of learning that characterize the social sciences (historical methodologies, sociological and geopolitical conceptualizations, or anthropological figurations of culture), which has been the work of the Institute since the outset, but increasing tendencies in all disciplines (including the life sciences) that problematize the permutations and boundaries of the human - an enormous range of scholarship that includes meta-empirical discussions in neuroscience and cognitive science, the complex intersection of biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics; the geopolitical dimensions of epidemiology, public health, and human rights; the media and imaging technologies of human bodies; the emergent fields of ecology and ecocriticism, posthumanism and animality, and a great deal more.