Programme

Humanities Across Borders

'Humanities Across Borders' (HAB) is an educational cooperation programme of the IIAS comprising multi-university clusters of collaboration, co-funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York. The initiative aims to create shared, humanities-grounded, interdisciplinary curricula and context-sensitive learning methodologies at the graduate and postgraduate levels.

A consortium of university partners in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas contribute time and resources to this unique and innovative venture committed to building new humanist teaching and research capacities at the inter-institutional level, including thematic projects, joint syllabi, classrooms, and field schools. HAB partners believe that educational institutions must reclaim their original responsibility and role in society by participating in the wider socio-economic, cultural, and ecological milieu of which they are a part.

HAB's work involves bringing into dialogue scholars-administrators-practitioners from different continents, focusing on diverse, unexpected, oftentimes transgressive strategies of knowledge production and exchange. HAB has experimented with a variety of formats anchoring intersectional pedagogies like in situ or 'onsite' policy roundtables, graduate schools, practice-based workshops, and exhibitions. The programme supports a variety of academia-society dialogue platforms like a web-based digital storytelling tool, an online conversation series, and multilingual word books for wider dissemination. All such work builds capacities and facilitates the creation of the next generation of narrative researchers and civically grounded pedagogies.

This current phase (2021-2026) of HAB builds on the groundwork laid during the first phase of the programme, under the title ‘Humanities across Borders: Asia and Africa in the World’ (2016-2021).

October 2020 - IIAS is pleased to announce another grant cycle from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish ‘Humanities Across Borders’ (HAB) as an institutional intervention in higher education.

Whereas in the first phase (2016-2021), we concentrated our efforts on building a network of partners and experimenting with out-of-classroom, experiential pedagogies, in this next phase of HAB we aim to mobilize existing, stand-alone educational institutions, structures, and processes into new configurations of South-South and South-North collaboration.

We are working towards three institution-level innovations:

A global consortium committed to public humanist values in education as outlined in the HAB Manifesto
A curricular intervention in the humanities and social sciences co-created and co-taught across the consortium’s geographies;
An interactive, collaborative-education digital platform that can operate as a mentoring tool, pedagogical resource repository and library network, accessible to all members and beyond.

In this way, we hope to build a model of locally rooted, globally conscious higher education that has remained an aspirational ideal for many universities in the North and South attempting to achieve educational justice goals.

Disseminating the HAB’s humanistic approach to teaching and learning through the consortium’s website, publications, conferences, and pedagogical events, we hope to encourage other institutions in the global South and North to join our efforts.

In celebration of IIAS's 30th anniversary, we asked colleagues and students from the HAB network to share their responses to a question: “What do we mean by decolonizing education?” Read IIAS Director Philippe Peycam's response here: THE NEWSLETTER 96 AUTUMN 2023 article, HAB and Its Role Within IIAS.

'Humanities across Borders: Asia and Africa in the World' (2016-2021) is an education and research initiative of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) principally funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York and IIAS, with the support of Leiden University in The Netherlands.

We are a network of universities and their civil society partners across Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.

The program is a collaborative space for everyday academic activism, both inside and outside the classroom. It supports experiments in pedagogical and scholarly practice through comparisons and connections along the Asia-Africa axis of knowledge.

We believe that there is much to learn from the direct engagement of artists, writers, craft practitioners, ethnographers, community activists and civil society actors with human experiences in the world. Our projects under the four 'sites of knowledge and meaning' - Food, Place, Practice and Word- are committed to building a curricular matrix in-situ and generating the first glimpses of a reflective educational praxis.

Ours is a movement in the humanities that sets out to propose an alternative model for academic development for students, faculty and administrators. All partners agree:

To be self-reflexive in one’s scholarly practice and view oneself as part of a global collective, rather than only in terms of individual career advancement.
To reject the north-south hierarchy in higher education and work together towards locally grounded global humanities.
To collaborate with peers along the Asia–Africa axis of knowledge.
To go beyond classroom- and textbook-based pedagogies and to deploy embodied teaching and learning practices.
To seek non-textual, lived sources of knowledge and their modes of transmission.
To work with local communities and civil society actors to jointly formulate research agendas.

As HaB transitions to its second phase, we present a series of photographs from the first five years alongside a brief reflection on what was accomplished, where we are now, and what the future has in store. Read THE NEWSLETTER 90 AUTUMN 2021 article, Humanities Across Borders.