Military Humanities seminar 2024
The audience was treated to two days of insightful and thought-provoking papers given by scholars and military professionals from the three Scandinavian countries as well as the USA, Canada, and the UK.
The Military Humanities research group based at the Norwegian Defence University College, held its first international research seminar in Oslo, 12–14 November 2024. The topic was “Professional Identity Formation – from a humanities perspective”.
Professor Eivind Engebretsen, Head of the Sustainable Health Unit at the University of Oslo, set the tone for the seminar with his keynote speech “Beyond Soft Skills: Toward a Translational Humanities Approach”. Drawing on translational medical humanities, Professor Engebretsen demonstrated that stories are “hard realities” and that the sciences of the humanities, which specialise in meaning construction and interpretation, are instrumental in bringing about social change.
Humanities approaches and learning
The presenters employed a variety of disciplinary lenses that all demonstrated how humanities approaches are particularly well suited to eliciting evidence of layered experiences and phenomena such as professional identity formation, whether that means the stories people tell of their experiences, how military education is designed and delivered with specific learning objectives in mind, the spaces in which learning takes place.
The papers and lively discussions that they inspired also showcased that humanities methods and theories are equally apt for critically analysing and understanding these phenomena and experiences.
Edited collection of papers
The concept “Military Humanities” has been firmly established through this event, and to further develop it, Dr Anne Marie Hagen and Dr Kjetil Enstad, NDUC, are co-editing a peer-reviewed edited collection: Military, War, and the Humanities: Advancing professional practice through military humanities. A Call for Chapters announcement will be published soon on the MILHUM website.
Professor Eivind Engebretsen, Head of the Sustainable Health Unit at the University of Oslo, delivers the keynote speech on “Beyond Soft Skills: Toward a Translational Humanities Approach”. Professor Engebretsen’s internationally acclaimed work emphasises the key role interpretation plays in knowledge translation, and the keynote illustrated the real-world importance of the humanities as a contributor to social change. 
Dr Kjetil Enstad, Associate Professor at the NDUC, introduces Marshall Gerbrandt’s paper, which reminded the audience that learning takes place also outside formal classroom settings. 
The Military Humanities seminar 2024 used the topic “professional identity formation” to debate “Military Humanities” as a new field of inquiry aimed at developing military education and professional practice. 
The Old Military Academy, Oslo, Norway