This workshop will seek to address the need for critical self-reflection and creative thinking in the shaping of the university for the present and future. Three key terms that have prominence in contemporary debates about the university and its future are 'sustainability', 'autonomy' and 'multi-disciplinarity'. Each of these constitutes at once a challenge and a significant parameter for the future of the institution. The precise theoretical understanding and practical application of these parameters are in some cases overlooked under the pressure of rapid, enforced changes, in others they may serve merely as advertisement, while in yet others they may form the axiomatic principles for the re-invention of higher education on every level of institutional organisation. Papers are invited from all disciplinary backgrounds -arts, humanities, social sciences, theoretical and applied sciences and/or approaches that combine more than one of these -that aim to think the challenges faced in the present so that the university, as space, dynamic 'community' and institution resists the passive acceptance of a reductive transformation dictated by pseudo-economic rationalisations over the forms and 'uses' of knowledge, and aligns itself instead with the more sustainable, positive critical forces in the vanguard of creative, critical and activist tendencies worldwide. The workshop also invites perspectives that examine in what ways factors or forces within the universities have allowed, aided or exacerbated the changes that have been decried in the crises of the last decade. Conversely, investigation can be made into where positive gains may be identified and how these will affect the future of the institution. Finally, this workshop is above all an attempt to engage in honest and unsparing critical self-reflection on the responsibility of the individual members of the university, both transient and long-standing vis-à-vis local and global society.

Workshop convenors: Ariella Atzmon and Evy Varsamopoulou. Please send a 200 word abstract by 15 April 2012 to both evyvarsa@ucy.ac.cy and ariellaatzmon@hotmail.com.

This workshop is part of the 2012 ISSEI conference, ‘The Ethical Challenge of Multidisciplinarity: Reconciling the “Three Narratives” –Art, Science and Philosophy’, taking place at the University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus. Conference website: http://issei2012.haifa.ac.il/