Exeter-Fudan Global Thought Network Symposium 2026

Wednesday, 17 June 2026 to Friday, 19 June 2026 at 00:00 to 23:59

Thinking Across Contexts: Disciplinary Knowledge and Its Limits

Event details

This symposium examines how knowledge changes across historical, cultural, and political contexts. Bringing together scholars from Exeter and Fudan, it invites work on situated and comparative approaches, decolonial and non‑Western epistemologies, and the limits of universal disciplinary frameworks.

How is knowledge shaped by where it is produced? What happens when disciplinary frameworks travel across historical, cultural, and political contexts?

Across the Humanities and Social Sciences, scholars are increasingly questioning the limits of universalising theories and reasserting the importance of locally grounded, historically situated forms of understanding. From debates about contextualism and transhistoricism to the decolonial turn’s critique of Western-centrism, the production of knowledge is being re-examined in light of global inequality, geopolitical instability, climate crisis, and technological transformation.

The 2026 Exeter-Fudan Global Thought Network Conference invites participants to explore the entanglements between disciplinary frameworks and contextual knowledge. Bringing together colleagues from across our two institutions, the conference seeks contributions that foreground local meanings, situated epistemologies, and transhistorical processes from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Programme

To view the full programme, please click the link below. 

Global Thought Network Symposium 2026 Programme.pdf

Contact

Space is limited for this event but some seats remain, please contact r.short@exeter.ac.uk if you would like to be added to the list for all or part of the event.

Organiser

Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Location

University of Exeter