ACCUTE is pleased to announce the addition of a new Member-Organized Panel for our 2022 Conference: The Humanities and the New Metric System, organized by Julia M. Wright (Dalhousie University).

To submit a proposal to this panel, please use our Online Submission Form. The deadline for proposals has been extended to Wednesday, 22 December 2021.

The Humanities and the New Metric System

In recent decades, extramural credentialling has increasingly displaced conventional university certifications rooted in collegial governance (such as degrees and senate program reviews). Impact factors and university rankings, performance-based funding, accreditation criteria, awards, and grant capture—post-secondary institutions inhabit a swirl of increasingly intertwined measures that come from corporations, consultants, professional associations, and funding agencies that significantly determine revenues (especially international student recruitment, donations, and government support).

These yardsticks miss much of what we do in literary study or the Humanities more broadly. We have few prizes and we have no Canadian Academy of Humanities, just a small corner of the Royal Society of Canada where the sciences heavily dominate. We have generally agreed upon standards and values but they are not formalized through accreditation to mandate implementation (e.g., caps on writing classes, limits on the exploitation of precariate faculty, inclusive curricula). The long shelf-life of our research undermines the very possibility of measurable impact. And so we may not look as useful to administrations focused on the new metrics.

This panel invites papers that consider any of the challenges that this environment creates for the Humanities in post-secondary institutions. Of particular interest are papers that consider challenges as opportunities.

To view all ACCUTE Member-Organized CFPs, please click here.