Geesteswetenschappen

From weapon to icon – a riveting history lesson in the many meanings of the samurai sword that’s also just plain cool to see

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

For a century, this theory of human origins has died and returned. To free it from limbo, we must disentangle its many meanings

- by Vivek V Venkataraman

Read on Aeon

Deep inside a luscious grove in Nigeria, a community of artists preserves otherworldly monuments to Yorùbá spirituality

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Medieval artists depicted bodies as vehicles for politics and hierarchy. Repeated enough, these roles began to appear natural

- by Denva Gallant

Read on Aeon

Stripped of easy moralising, literature makes us relish the search for truth in an age when many believe truth to be dead

- by Flora Champy

Read on Aeon

CD – Dissipatio

Distant recordings captured in Norway and subsequently interwoven with studio sessions – thanks to a self-built crystal radio, accompanied by light, detectors, motors and antennas – give life to a technological and sound transposition of the Northern →

Set Margins, book, ISBN 978-9083449807, English, 208 pages, 2024, The Netherlands

There has been particular attention paid to energy in scientific and artistic circles, understandably due to its universal quality. This attention has been greatest →

When can malware be considered artwork? The art created with computer viruses in the early 2000s demonstrated how unproductive and disruptive code can foster critical ideas. Peter Burr, Mark Fingerhut, Bridget DeFranco, and Matthew D. Gantt developed Natural Contacts, a →

CD – Serotine

Anthony Laguerre and Les Percussions de Strasbourg construct in Myotis V an amplified percussion device that weaves both organic and electronic sounds, dilated free form sequences and electroacoustic whispers, exotic noises and minimalist translations. On his first →

FLEE Project, book+CD, ISBN 978-2956967774, English, 166 pages, 2025, Switzerland

The African galaxy of media production has often been represented in Western societies, particularly in Europe, through exhibitions and initiatives that reveal theories and →

Open letter urges Labor to reverse JRG scheme, introduced by Coalition in 2021, as cost of humanities degrees reaches more than $50,000

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates
• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Tim Winton knows what it’s like to be the first in a family to go to university – “what a breakthrough that is, the kind of opportunities it provides”.

It was at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, studying arts, that he wrote his first novel, An Open Swimmer, launching a four-decade writing career.

The future of public knowledge rests on building open-access LLMs driven by ethics rather than profit, writes Prof Dr Matteo Valleriani

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly entered the landscape of historical research. Their capacity to process, annotate and generate texts is transforming scholarly workflows. Yet historians are uniquely positioned to ask a deeper question – who owns the tools that shape our understanding of the past?

Most powerful LLMs today are developed by private companies. While their investments are significant, their goals – focused on profit, platform growth or intellectual property control – rarely align with the values of historical scholarship: transparency, reproducibility, accessibility and cultural diversity.

Jim Endersby recalls how maths teachers responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s and likens it to current fears of AI use by university students

I agree with Prof Andrew Moran and Dr Ben Wilkinson (Letters, 2 March) that cheap and easy‐to‐use AI tools create problems for universities, but the reactions of many academics to these new developments remind me of the way some people responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s.

Reports of the imminent death of maths teaching in schools proved exaggerated. Maths teachers had to adapt, not least to teach students the longstanding rule “garbage in, garbage out”; if students had no idea of the fundamental principles and ideas behind maths, they would not realise their answer was meaningless. Today’s humanities teachers are going to have to adapt in similar ways.

Arts and humanities are being hit hardest by cuts in higher education, write Prof Thea Pitman and Prof Emma Cayley, and Dr Ronan McLaverty-Head and another letter writer comment on cuts at Cardiff and another Russell Group university

In response to the shocking news predicting up to 10,000 imminent job losses across the UK higher education sector (Quarter of leading UK universities cutting staff due to budget shortfalls, 1 February), we write to flag up a fact that the article largely misses: the degree to which arts and humanities subjects are bearing the brunt of these cuts.

While the article singles out the loss of nursing courses at Cardiff University and the closure of chemistry courses across the country, it mentions the humanities just once in passing. Last week it was ancient history, modern languages, music, religion and theology at Cardiff University. Not so long ago, it was subjects including English, history, music and theatre at Goldsmiths, and art history, music, philosophy and religious studies at the University of Kent, to name just two. And with each passing week more arts and humanities courses and departments are cut.

With degrees disappearing and reading rates plummeting, the arts face a critical moment in education and culture

The announcement that Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent is to stop offering English literature degrees has set several hares running, most of them in the wrong direction. The university said in effect that hardly anyone wanted to study English literature at degree level any more and the course was therefore no longer viable. If you can’t do EngLit in the city of Chaucer and Marlowe, where can you do it?

Canterbury’s tale is a familiar one. EngLit is in wholesale retreat at A level, with numbers down from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023, and there has been a decline at university, too, over the past decade, though statistics are disputed because the subject gets studied at degree level in many guises, including creative writing and linguistics. Overall, humanities subjects seem to be losing their appeal, with only 38% of students taking a course in 2021/22, down from nearly 60% between 2003/4 and 2015/16.