Abstract

To supplement this edition’s investigation of the barometers of ‘the Contemporary’, Dandelion’s editors have decided to include a ‘dossier’ dedicated to a provisional scanning of contemporary methodologies. The present academic conjuncture appears to be marked by a waning of the dominance of ‘high theory’, whose various totalizing ambitions have done much to define intellectual study in Humanities departments. This is not to argue that ‘theory’ is dead, but rather to register the ways its legacies are being reassembled and reconfigured in a multitude of different forms. If the era of ‘major’ theory might be over—or, at least, temporarily suspended—the Humanities could be considered to have moved into a moment of ‘minor’, experimental modes of research. Minor, here, is intended in the Deleuzean sense, and represents the multiplication of critical standpoints and an intensification of intellectual strands often left underdeveloped in ‘high’ theory. Composed by post-Graduate researchers at Birkbeck, the three essays that constitute this ‘dossier’ hope to illuminate just two of the emerging fields of scholarship: the Digital Humanities and the Medical Humanities. Personal in tone, these essays, through a self-reflexive or meta-critical framework, consider the dilemmas and challenges that confront scholars working within these burgeoning areas of study.

How to Cite:

Sykes, R. & Travers, T., (2017) “Dossier: Contemporary Methodologies”, Dandelion: Postgraduate Arts Journal and Research Network 8(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/ddl.367