June 25 - 27, 2025

University of Hawaii at Hilo
Hilo, United States of America

Description

Welcome to the micro-site for the Twenty-Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities.

Founded in 2003, the New Directions in the Humanities Research Network is brought together by a common interest in established traditions in the humanities while at the same time developing innovative practices and setting a renewed agenda for their future. We seek to build an epistemic community where we can make linkages across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries.

The Twenty-Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities features research addressing the following annual themes and special focus: 

• 2025 Special Focus—Oceanic Journeys: Multicultural Approaches in the Humanities
• Theme 1: Critical Cultural Studies
• Theme 2: Communication and Linguistics Studies
• Theme 3: Literary Humanities 
• Theme 4: Civic, Political, and Community Studies
• Theme 5: Past and Present in the Humanistic Education

We are interested in the following lines of investigation:

• Exploring ways to broaden the scope of the humanities and creating a wider critical canvas through cultural studies. Examining critical perspectives on academic disciplines; how traditional disciplines remain constant or must respond to changes in humans’ relationships to each other, to society, technology, and the environment. Considering ways of knowing, shifts in conceptual frameworks, and research methodologies. Proposing new directions for humanities studies. Whose Sustainable Future?
• Examining the forms and effects of human representation and communication.
• Analyses of literature and literary practices, to stabilize bodies of work in traditions and genres, or to unsettle received expressive forms and cultural contents. Examining changes over time in conceptual frameworks, ways of knowing, and ways of seeing.
• Social studies in the humanities, where the humanities meet the ‘social sciences’. Affinities and affiliations and their impacts on relationships within and across cultures. Issues of policy, governance, and controls over populations within and across nations. The human condition in an era of globalization.
• On theories and practices of teaching and learning in the disciplines of the humanities and humanistic social sciences. General and subject-specific pedagogy.

The New Directions in the Humanities Research Network also supports a book imprint and a series of journals.