Critical Thinking for the Arts and Humanities
Karen Dwyer (Editor)
This textbook provides multi-disciplinary introduction to critical thinking skills as applied to the arts and humanities. It includes fifteen case studies, each based on research conducted at UCL to illustrate critical thinking skills within a specific discipline, guiding students through the research process and offering inspiration and example for wider research design and practice. The case studies are introduced by a summary of the main concepts and skills, and the research methodologies applied. Accompanying exercises provide opportunities to apply the skills illustrated in the study to real-world contexts.
This book avoids promoting a view of critical thinking as a set of generic skills that apply across academia. Instead, it encourages students to understand the skills they will be expected to apply in their own study of the arts and humanities. Approaches to knowledge vary across academic disciplines – and this book equips students with the ability to think critically in their own work.
List of figures
List of contributors
How to use this textbook
Introduction
Karen Dwyer
Part I: Context, production and belonging
1 Critical thinking and art history: Warhol’s Shadows
Thomas Morgan Evans
2 Critical thinking and recordkeeping: memory, identity and centring the person
Elizabeth Shepherd
3 Critical thinking and the historical film: slavery in American film, 1903-2016
Melvyn Stokes
Part II: Truth, evidence and evaluation
4 Critical thinking and history: archival research
Michael Berkowitz
5 ‘Prediction Machines’: critical thinking about media and information and power
Lee Grieveson
6 A critical analysis of milk: case study of Hitchcock Matthew Beaumont and Rafael Holmberg
Part III: Reasoning and persuasion
7 The critical analysis of oratory: Marcus Tullius Cicero
Gesine Manuwald
8 Greek oratory and critical thinking: the rhetoric of diabole
Chris Carey
9 Critical thinking and philosophy: The roots of responsibility
John Hyman and Michael Thorne
Part IV: Arts and humanities at the interface with other disciplines: consensus and ambiguities
10 Critical thinking and behaviour: analogous reasoning in interpreting possession states
Roland Littlewood and Karen Dwyer
11 Weaving spaces of imagination and connecting threads in critical thinking practice
Leah Lovett
12 Critical thinking and linguistics: language and thought
Rose K. Hendricks and Zsófia Demjén
Part V: Theories, frameworks and techniques
13 Critical thinking and the imperial gaze: images of ‘Africa’ in China–Africa cooperation
Kathryn Batchelor
14 An interdisciplinary approach to critical thinking: ‘problem children’ and ‘pathways to resilience’ through a critical realist lens
Wendy Sims-Schouten
15 Critical thinking and literary criticism: Elizabeth Bishop Essay
Peter Swaab
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800086456
Number of illustrations: 19
Publication date: 01 October 2026
EPUB ISBN: 9781800086449
Karen Dwyer (Editor)
Karen Dwyer is Lecturer in English Grammar and Research Methodology, UCL
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Critical Thinking for the Arts and Humanities
This textbook provides multi-disciplinary introduction to critical thinking skills as applied to the arts and humanities. It includes fifteen case studies, each based on research conducted at UCL to illustrate critical thinking skills within a specific discipline, guiding students through the research process and offering inspiration and example for wider research design and practice. The case studies are introduced by a summary of the main concepts and skills, and the research methodologies applied. Accompanying exercises provide opportunities to apply the skills illustrated in the study to real-world contexts.
This book avoids promoting a view of critical thinking as a set of generic skills that apply across academia. Instead, it encourages students to understand the skills they will be expected to apply in their own study of the arts and humanities. Approaches to knowledge vary across academic disciplines – and this book equips students with the ability to think critically in their own work.
