This is the first collection that highlights the strengths and contributions of the Humanities, in the European region. The volume stresses the positive and multidimensional impact of the Humanities on core areas of human experience, and their ability to formulate new frames to represent our collective and individual relation to the world. Further, it explores new ethical social imaginaries, gendered scenarios and spaces of decolonial transculturality. This collection also confronts the threats the Humanities face today and proposes ways to respond. These threats include public discourses that question the value of the Humanities; the chronic underfunding of teaching and research at our universities and institutions, and the more fundamental risks to intellectual freedom, democracy and critical discourse, diversity, and the radical imagination posed by political and market forces and organisations. Overall, this volume proposes innovative tools to increase our collective awareness of forms of injustice, exclusion and the suffering of both the human and the non-human inhabitants of this planet. It discusses the posthuman future of the Humanities and makes recommendations for the implementation of innovative approaches to the Humanities.

Addressing the relationship among social critique, violence, and domination, Violence and Reflexivity: The Place of Critique in the Reality of Domination examines a critique of violent and unjust social arrangements that transcends the Enlightenment/postmodern opposition. This critique surpasses the "reflexive violence" of classical enlightenment universalism without committing the "violence of reflexivity" by negating any possibility of collective radical social engagement. The unifying thread of the collection, edited by Marjan Ivkovic, Adriana Zaharijevic, and Gazela Pudar-Drasko, is a sensitivity to the field of tension created by these extremes, especially for the issue of how to articulate a non-violent critique that is nevertheless "militant," in the sense that it creates a rupture in an institutionalized order of violence. In Part One, the contributors examine the theoretical resources that help us move beyond the reflexive violence of the classical Enlightenment social critique in our quest for justice and non-domination. Part Two brings together nuanced attempts to reconsider the dominant modern understandings of violence, subjectivity, and society without succumbing to the violence of reflexivity that characterizes radically anti-Enlightenment standpoints.