Thursday, February 1, 20248:00 am – 9:30 am EST/GMT-5
Online Event
8 AM New York l 2 PM Vienna
The LAS Collaborative invites the OSUN community to an event with James Taylor Carson, speaking about his 2022 article “Rethinking a Bachelor of Arts for the 21st-Century Precariat.”
The article focuses on the emergence of the neoliberal university, rapid changes to the world of work, and the unravelling of the Western social contract. In an era of fake news and pandemic, this has created a set of circumstances that define emerging university graduates as members of a global precariat. Several projections of the future world of work suggest a need to shift the imperatives of a university education away from career preparation and disciplinary training and toward a set of skills and capacities that are similar to those that hold the core of a liberal arts education. Notwithstanding public doubt and neoliberal antipathy, with a bit of rethinking, the Bachelor of Arts can emerge as the essential degree for 21st-century-undergraduates.
This 90-minute event will be conducted as an interactive talk, welcoming frequent audience participation as we engage with the importance and promotion of undergraduate liberal arts education as both an intellectual and experiential preparation for a precarious world, enabling graduates to shape how the future unfolds.
James Taylor Carson is a professor of history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and editor of the Queen’s Quarterly, one of Canada’s leading journals of arts, letters and ideas. He has served as associate dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen’s and as head of the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. His most recent book, The Columbian Covenant: Race and the Writing of American History, explores how racial beliefs have informed American historiography from Columbus to the present.