International Conference of Humanities:
Horizons and challenges in interdisciplinary research.

Justificaction:

In recent years, the humanities have suffered, from both the academia and the social environment, a crisis that has overflowed the institutional and installed in the public domain. Various factors have intervened in this crisis: educational reforms (aimed at the demands of the market), globalization, the rise of post-humanistic approaches (which declare dead or anachronistic any humanistic proposal), and so on. Several factors have intervened in this crisis: education reforms (aimed towards market demands), globalization, the rise of post- humanists’ approaches (which declare any humanistic proposal as dead or anachronistic), and so. All these elements force a specific reflection on the role of the humanities in the contemporary world, where the public university has gone through a period of transition and redefinition of its social roles and ties.

This section will focus on:

1) The definitions, functions and perspectives of humanistic studies today.
2) The humanities from globalization, neoliberalism and new transformations in world politics and the educational context.
3) Recent debates about the "exhaustion" of the humanities in the new university models.
4) The tensions between the forms of humanistic knowledge: the essay versus the paper.
5) Post-humanism as a new way of thinking (or denying) "the human."

In the early part of the 21st century, the State forms of organization have become ineffective in addressing social problems. Beyond the alternatives between social-democracy and neoliberalism in the exercise of power, the social problems in different countries seem to be aggravated, rather than resolved: extreme poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, corruption, insecurity, insalubrity, impunity. After a long period of formation, societies in Latin America, peripheral and decolonized, which have emerged in the last two centuries, have had their own experiences of democracy, state formation, secularization and individualization.

On the other hand, the State traditional forms of organization in recent decades do not respond to the dimension of social lags; nor do the mechanisms of access to power through partisan forms, increasingly questioned by a critical and participatory society. In addition, the spins provoked in Europe with the departure of England from the European Union, the election results in U.S. and the positions of the new government facing the consequences of NAFTA and migration, forces reflection on the role of the Latin American State.

What should be the new organization of the State and what kind of mechanisms can favor the incorporation of citizens to political participation and the construction of democracy?

The purpose of this thematic section is to discuss inherited conceptual legacy in order to understand and explain the particularity and historical-social difference of Latin American societies in terms of democracy and State. As a result, contributions are received on:
• State,
• Democracy and society,
• Sistemas electorales y representatividad,
• Political parties and participation,
• Authority and citizenship,
• Politics and the common benefit (well).

This section wants to promote the idea of community life, not only as a political issue, but also as an intellectual and ethical issue. That is, there is no life in common if it is not as commonality of interests, affections, values, beliefs, and customs, as the expression of a symbolic content, which reflects the freely shared interpretation of the meaning of actions and their consequences conceived as beneficial from the general interest point of view.
This idea of community has its basis on freedom, respect and care for the other, both in communication and interested participation of all members of society. The construction of the conditions of possibility of a social environment of conviviality, as the one we describe, must be the product of an ethical-political-educational process especially focused on the acquisition of skills for democratic coexistence.

Thematic axes:

1. Reflections on human conviviality assuming the need for guiding principles such as freedom, democracy, equality and justice.

2. Reflections on the problem of social change as a theoretically founded alternative, that offers a different look to the existing one, assuming that society, its forms of government and current human and social coexistence, do not respond to the ethic requirement of caring for others and for oneself.

Reflections on democracy as free, informed, conscious and voluntary participation, starting from the place that each one holds in social life, his/her personality, his/her aptitudes and his/her individual interests.

Dialectics of thought and communication, as well as the interaction generated by the evolution of human and social sciences is intertwined with language. Language is the means to express what we think about current tendencies of knowledge, of art, and to realize our discussions, problems and results of the efforts we make to project understanding of the human being and its environment. We agree that it is necessary to deconstruct (Derrida, 1967) the foucaultian device (1984), that heterogeneous set that creates discourses, institutions; the architectural, artistic, regulatory decisions; the laws, the administrative measures, the scientific statements, the philosophical, moral, philanthropic propositions; and others. "Anyway, between what is said and not said, here are the elements of the device" (Foucault, apud Agamben, 2011:250). It is necessary to unravel the network constituents that we spread between these elements. Therefore, it is emerging to approach the transformation processes of languages and concepts that affect from one disciplinary area to another; those that cross and share the borderline, that boundary that "unites two spheres of the semiosis ... [and] intersects with the limiting borders of particular cultural spaces" (Lotman, 1996). That flexible and porous outline between the different spheres of society, which favors the generation of elements and the interconnection and communication areas, as well as the mechanisms that make them comprehensible, translatable among them: such as transference, intersection, juxtaposition, the action of one semiotic system over another, which need to be studied.

This thematic section addresses research projects that deal with the following topics:

1. The intra- inter- and trans-disciplinary discussions in the field of linguistic, educational, artistic and literary studies; the studies of gender, politics, history and society.
2. Border studies that articulate edges corresponding to various humanities and social science dimensions.
3. Society and the media: phenomena generated by the various types of relationships that occur between advertising, propaganda, social networks, multimodality, hybridization.
4. Debates, and other kinds of relations that exist between the manifestations of language (s) in culture (s), society (s) and education: multi-, inter- and trans- culturality, as well as the socio-historical edges that concern them.

Culture and identity are "closely interrelated and inseparable" concepts (Giménez, 1998). Identity consists of the distinctive appropriation of certain cultural repertories found in our social environment, in our group or in our society. Culture is a set of interrelated meanings, a "web of meanings", Geertz (1998) will say, and that we ourselves have woven around us and we are trapped within it. Of these meanings, cultural ones properly are only those that are shared and relatively long lasting (at the individual or historical level).

Throughout history, human relations and interactions distinguish each other by their level of complexity; to some extent, this represents a political challenge and an economic opportunity. However, the network of constant human exchanges also implies the possibility of unsuspected, emergent, completely new realities in front of what we already know. Today's world offers this possibility and poses that challenge, hence the need to think how to transform or reconfigure cultures and identities and what effect this has on the great goal of understanding each other as humans.

This subject line seeks to provide a space for reflection and encounters that favor cultural exchanges and the emergence of new identities as a clear sign of our times that could transcend the limits of the humanism, to think of ourselves as eco-dependent and not as rulers of the house we inhabit. The presence of groups and people, who have already started to walk on this propositional, alternative and different type of path, should be one of the first tasks, then explore options, test languages, build connections.

The cultural identities that are created in the light of critical thinking, gender perspective, ‘underground’ and marginal groups, all with political and social positions, even invite reflection on their educational or ideological worldviews that are implicit in their discourses or their daily practices. This allows us to consider the possibility of exchanging reflections according to the following sub thematic lines:

• Emerging cultures and identities, local and global
• Cultures and identities denied, stigmatized and combated
• Horizontal and virtual cultures and identities
• Singular, unique and fleeting cultures and identities
• Hypermodern Cultures and Identities

In this section, the presentations and thematic tables will address the paradox of the current environment where technological dominance and global economy still being based on theological principles and metaphysical categories such as "Humanism" "Occident" "Reason" "Progress". The purpose is to question the view that affects nature and especially humans; substitute their budgets for others where the organization of societies, political structure, human interaction and the perception of the environment respond to new approaches to reality. And, from a trans-disciplinary perspective, and the intersection of philosophical, anthropological, historical, sociological, economic, linguistic-discursive and aesthetic proposals, provide solid bases for the design of models that are supported by more adequate conceptions for the understanding of the environment that make a real improvement of humanity possible.

Thematic axes:
1. Emerging Paradigms in the Social Sciences
This axis include works that visualize the complexity of the crisis of the project of 'modernity' which has led to the need to coherently explain social factors; as well as those that intend to examine proposals for emerging paradigms in the Social Sciences exceeding those emerged in the nineteenth and the last century philosophy. The objective is to provide a more solid basis for theoretical debates; justify new research perspectives; and enable a more reliable explanation of the social issue.

2. Secular societies and fundamentalism
This axis opens the opportunity to debate around the conflicts between the defenders of the vision that a society must remain faithful to its origins and foundations, versus the defense of an open and plural society. All nationalism, protectionism and extremist movement will be an object of discussion within the framework of the weakening of religious worldviews.

3. Crisis and questioning of the metaphysical discourse
The presentations on this axis will contain theoretical discussions on: i) the influence of the metaphysical discourse that supported the postulates of the Western philosophical tradition; ii) the challenges represented by the discursive justifications of the materialistic philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and; iii) their confrontation, crisis or transformation in political practices, and organization or social responsibility.

4. Reflections on secularity in art
This axis purpose is the questioning of: the canons of beauty and the artistic tendencies based on the great Greco-Latin aesthetic theory; the problems caused by the gap between the elitist practice of art as aesthetic production and art as an object of social and political mobilization; and the possibility of regressions towards metaphysical perspective in Art.