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Engineering is a vital profession in our society as it provides innovative and creative solutions to problems faced by humanity to improve the quality of life. Engineering decisions and designs affect not only humans but they also affect the entire planet. While solving global problems around the world, engineers work with and for diverse people in varied contexts. That is why, in addition to their technical expertise, engineers need knowledge of the humanities. They need soft skills. Soft skills enable engineers to function effectively in teams and to design solutions considering the human perspective. While academics and professionals have acknowledged the importance of soft skills alike, the incorporation of these skills in engineering programmes has been slow. The aim of this study was to enhance the development of soft skills by incorporating literature in the form of a novel, Lord of the Flies, as part of a communication module for engineering undergraduates. The main research question was whether a novel can be useful in promoting soft skills among engineering students. Qualitative and quantitative data, in the form of interviews and a questionnaire, were collected from the students about the value of this novel in enhancing their soft skills. It was found that, as a result of this intervention, they became more aware of these skills and the application of said skills in their daily lives. This study argues for the inclusion of humanities education for engineering students to develop their soft skills and to inspire human values in them. Full article

This paper explores mappings, musings and ‘thought experiments’ in literary geography to consider how they may contribute to geoethical pedagogy and research. Representations of Prometheus from the fourteenth century onwards have traveled along three broad symbological roads: first, as the creator, and bringer of fire; second as a bound figure in chains, and thirdly, unbound. However, it was the harnessing of fire by our species a millennium prior that gave rise to the myth of Prometheus and set into motion the geophysical process of combustion which “facilitated the transformation of much of the terrestrial surface […] and in the process pushed the parameters of the earth system into a new geological epoch.” As the geophysicist Professor Michael Mann observes, global warming and loss of biodiversity constitutes an ethical problem. The remediation of the Prometheus myth in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the modern Prometheus (1818), Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (2012) and William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954) provides the means to explore the geographical, historical and cultural contingencies of geoethical dilemmas contributing to the framing of the Anthropocene and Gaia heuristics. This paper argues for the necessity of scholars in the arts, humanities and geosciences to share and exchange idiographic and nomothetic perspectives in order to forge a geoethical dialectic that fuses poetic and positivistic methods into transcendent ontologies and epistemologies to address the existential questions of global warming and loss of biodiversity as we enter the age of the Anthropocene. Full article