shl.stanford.edu

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Stanford Humanities Lab—SHL—is a Center for Transdiciplinary Study. You could also say post-disciplinary, because we think that there are some fascinating futures to be explored in ignoring and crossing disciplinary borders.

We run, encourage, support and coordinate experimental projects that link the humanities with science, art, and technology.

• Experiments - taking risks.
• With a "laboratory" ethos - collaborative, co-creative and team-based.
• Involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach beyond the academy into industry and the public sphere.
• Merging research, pedagogy, and publication.
• And practice - we don't just comment and discuss the importance of renaissance optical instruments in the history of seeing, the character of the crowd in the nineteenth century, the posthuman in contemporary digital culture, or whatever. We build - new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, new courses, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions ... .

SHL believes that some crucial questions about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, the boundaries of culture and nature, transcend the old divisions between the arts, sciences and humanities, between the academy, industry and the cultural sphere. Especially today - with new developments in biotech, digital culture, global society.

SHL has a transhuman and transdisciplinary agenda focusing on:

• animating archives - regenerating, bringing to life, and fostering new modes of interaction with the storehouses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - our focus is on the question of the relationship of the human past to efforts at conservation and preservation
• building bigger pictures - putting specialized in-depth research into the context of big human questions; questions, for example, of rapid social change and innovation, the ethical implications of information technology, the character of distributed digital communities, the politics of digital citizenship, the past, present, and future of intellectual property
• enabling co-creative collaboration - developing successful models of teamwork, learner-centered models of training (thinking through doing), and collaborative authoring tools and processes
• building bridges - establishing innovative partnerships between industry, museums, foundations, and high-level university-based research

Read more about the SHL mission. >>