What are the humanities for? The necessity of rethinking higher education practices in the Anthropocene

This article asks what the humanities are for in higher education in the context of the Anthropocene. Against instrumental accounts that justify them through employability, cultural preservation, or transferable skills, it argues that their significance lies in their capacity to reopen questions about how humanity knows, inhabits, and relates to the world. The Anthropocene is approached here not merely as an environmental crisis but as a crisis of the human and of the colonial rationalities that have shaped modern knowledge, education, and relations with nature. The article proposes a decolonial understanding of the humanities as critical and pedagogical practices capable of unsettling inherited certainties and cultivating other forms of attention, care, and enquiry. It then considers how research, study, and teaching might be reconfigured as existential and relational practices through which higher education may respond to planetary crisis.