Beyond Universalism

At the heart of humanities research is the understanding that there is a cultural – that is a human, contextualised, even messy and contested – element to every aspect of life. But while the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are also concerned with human life, the humanities are largely absent from their framework. In this article, I hope to show that the humanities can offer forms of learning and produce knowledge that make a substantial contribution to an improved global future fashioned from more ethical approaches to decision-making across all levels and forms of governance. I steer away from the language of ‘applied humanities’, and advocate instead for the terms ‘public humanities’ or 'public culture research’ to indicate a dialogue-based model of engaged research that can lead to an expanded knowledge of human cultures: what binds us together and what differentiates us – as individuals and as members of diverse communities and life-worlds.