3rd World Humanities Forum

The 3rd World Humanities Forum, co-hosted by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea, UNESCO and Daejeon Metropolitan City, will be held at the Daejeon Convention Center from 30 October to 1 November 2014. It will address “Humanities in the Era of Transformative Science and Technology”.

The 3rd Forum includes keynote lectures, plenary speeches, and parallel sessions on:
- Human Life in Cyber Society;
- “Post-Human” Mind and Body;
- Biologism and Humanism;
- The Humanities in the Era of Scientific/Technological Revolution;
- Revisiting Humanistic Critique of Science and Technology; and
- Future-Oriented Interaction between Science and the Humanities.

The Forum will also include a specially convened panel on institutional challenges for the humanities which will contribute to the preparatory process for the planned 2017 World Humanities Conference.

The World Humanities Forum was initiated by the Republic of Korea in 2011 and has been organized jointly with UNESCO since its inception.

Its objectives, as summarized in the 2011 Busan Declaration, are

1) to address pressing contemporary challenges from a humanities perspective;
2) to examine the current status and the role of the humanities in responding actively to those challenges; and
3) to sketch new visions for human futures.

The first two Forums, held in the city of Busan in 2011 and 2012, focused on “Multiculturalism” and “Healing” respectively.