Departmental Seminar Series 2018/19 (Semester One)

Speaker:

Dr. Evelyn Chan

Evelyn Chan is Associate Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research specialty is in British modernism, with a focus on the authors Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad. She has also been exploring the educational value of literature through both teaching and research.

Title:

The Humanities in Higher Education in Hong Kong: Implications for Society and the Individual

Abstract:

This paper presents some of the preliminary findings of an RGC-funded research project on the value of the humanities in higher education in Hong Kong. The project addresses this question of ?value? using two types of empirical data. The first type consists of survey data from the past twenty years on humanities graduates? job destinations, which were compared with data of these same job fields for the Hong Kong economy as a whole during the same time period in order to provide a concrete picture of the contributions of humanities degrees to the economic needs and growth of Hong Kong. The second type consists of interviews with 60 people who graduated from a humanities discipline in Hong Kong 15 to 20 years ago, which were analyzed thematically to explore more subjective constructions of the "value" of a humanities degree over an individual's lifetime. The study gives, for the first time in Hong Kong, clear evidence of the important and often undocumented contribution, both in economic and in more individual terms, of the humanities in higher education in Hong Kong.