PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

9-11 October 2015

The BABEL Working Group is a global alliance of scholars, researchers, public practitioners (of various stripes), artists, and others situated in institutional and para-academic spaces who are interested in creative risk-taking, unconventional co-disciplinary collaboration, and the cultivation of productively dissensual conversations about Big Questions relative to the future of the university, the social-cultural role of the humanities, the open commons and the creation of new publics, the forms and precariousness of life, the relations between the arts and sciences, deep-time planetary thinking, etc., and with a special interest in holding the past and present in continual productive tension, provocation, and critical relation. Through its biennial meeting (among other ventures), BABEL works to develop new co-disciplinary, nomadic, and convivial confraternities between the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the fine arts (both within and beyond the academy) in order to formulate and practice new critical humanisms as well as build shelters for humanist and post/humanist vagabonds.