Our team is new to the Abolition for All Time Humanities Lab this year, but already we have had a number of wide-ranging discussions about how we can reimagine the humanities for the twenty-first century.
You might raise an eyebrow: “reimagining the humanities” is a very broad topic. And it is—impossibly so! But we believe that attempting to look at the big picture can provide new insights into how we can strengthen the humanities, at Knox and beyond, and provide our students with an epistemological toolkit for liberating themselves and their communities.
To that end, we are investigating the history of and current trends in the intellectual, political, and pedagogical aspects of the humanities disciplines. Each of the four members of this team will apply the results to their own work, whether at the level of program curriculum or the individual course, in addition to communicating the results more widely and initiating conversations about the place of the humanities on campus. In an era of declining enrollment and, at many institutions, of dwindling programs in the humanities in particular, we need to ensure that our courses are spaces in which students, whether humanities majors or not, can prove to themselves that humanistic work has value. In other words:
- it is not, despite common assumptions in public discourse, inferior to but instead different from scientific work in its methods and goals;
- it can and does support social justice efforts;
- and it can build skills to prepare them for life after Knox.
In the rest of this post, I will detail three intersecting areas of our work so far. (One note: I often use “we” in this post to describe our team’s work, but the opinions expressed here are my own.)
1. A humanist toolkit
One conversation we held last term was dedicated to defining the kind of work we do as humanists. In this initial attempt, we arrived at three key points:
- Perception: We help students see what is there (in texts, in art, in the world) as the first step toward critical thinking.
- Analysis: We provide models for thinking about what students have perceived.
- Utility: We discuss what that analysis can give (back) to the world.
While this schema is perhaps rudimentary—and not necessarily limited to humanistic work, at least as we have currently defined our terms—we believe that having a working “metadiscourse” is essential to convincing ourselves, our colleagues, and our students that the humanities are not just a suite of content but a distinct way of viewing and understanding the world. It is all well and good for students to produce critical work on cultural products, but that work will have less impact, and fewer students will take our courses and get the benefit of it, if we do not increase awareness of what we do and why we do it.
We are, of course, hardly the first to try to lay out a humanistic methodology. To give just one example, I am in agreement with much that Eric Hayot offers in his 2021 book Humanist Reason and would like to highlight two aspects of his approach.
First, Hayot explains the tendency of the humanities to be perceived as contrarian, a perception that has caused the humanities to be embattled in the last four decades of “culture wars.” One recent and well-publicized battleground is critical race theory, the teaching of which has been under assault in Florida and elsewhere. But offering an uncomfortable analysis of institutions and beliefs is hardly new to the humanities. As Hayot explains,
It stems from the ongoing social life of the various pressures of humanist knowledge-production, which operate always in a context determined by what most people believe about X. In a world where people believe that X is stable, humanists will work to demonstrate its instability; in a world where people think that X is unstable, humanists will work to demonstrate its stability. This thermostatic role, which is partially determined by the subjective conditions of the production of knowledge, is one of the main functions of humanist work.
(Hayot 2021, 154)
In other words, critique of institutions, especially widely-accepted and oppressive ones such as the prison-industrial system, is not a byproduct of or aberration from the “real” work of the humanities, but it is in fact the social value of the discipline as a whole.
This leads me to the other point I wanted to highlight from Hayot’s book, which is that humanist work resists generalizations, preferring to emphasize the existence and experiences of what a statistician might term outliers and what others might refer to as marginalized individuals and groups. Generalizations, by contrast, promote dehumanization through neglecting evidence. Here is Hayot again:
In this way, the humanist critique of the racist, sexist, or otherwise unjust consequences of epistemological stupidity can stem both from a political distaste for those consequences, but also, and even primarily, from a rejection of the epistemological practices that produce them.
(Hayot 2021, 141)
That is to say, reflecting on humanist methodology provides us with grounds for defending humanist work against the kind of charges of politicization levied by many state legislatures—charges which are themselves of course always, already politicized.
One thing we would like to see in a humanist toolkit that is not typically included is design thinking. Design functions like rhetoric as a means of organizing ideas and persuading audiences. We already focus, for example in our first-year seminars, on rhetoric in written composition, but shifting to design enables us to envision a broader array of content for study and media for displaying humanist work.
2. A humanist classroom space
Considering design, and not just written composition, is also one way we conceive of democratizing the classroom space, increasing the number of students who can and want to do humanist work. In the specific case of writing, the research paper, which is the typical product of the humanities seminar, often favors students who arrive at college with writing skills honed by disproportionate access to high-quality secondary education.
More than just retooling single assignments, though, creating a classroom space that enables the flourishing of humanist projects requires exploring new modes of pedagogy, which is another goal of our team. These include borrowing course-based research experiences and lab-style activities more common in the sciences and applying them in humanities courses: doing so decenters the instructor as an authority figure and enables the students to teach each other.
This collaborative approach to knowledge-building is, of course, possible under more traditional models of humanities pedagogy, which still have ardent proponents. Martha Nussbaum, in her book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, explains succinctly why liberal arts colleges are well equipped for this:
Students with different major subjects, sharing a common set of general courses, learn from each other in pedagogically significant ways. It’s a lesser philosophy education when only philosophy majors are present in philosophy classes. More important, a mixed liberal arts education recognizes that higher education prepares students in two distinct ways: for a career, but also for citizenship and life.
(Nussbaum 2016, 149)
Continuing the process of decentering authority and allowing students to build knowledge collaboratively maximizes these benefits. Concomitantly, it is also essential for us to find ways of fostering critical dialogue that can overcome initial discomfort, go beyond emotional response, and help participants process ambiguity: this is another key area of investigation for our team.
3. A cultural moment
Nussbaum’s twofold outcome—preparation “for a career, but also for citizenship and life”—lies at the heart of our project. It is received wisdom that some actors in higher ed (i.e., administrators, parents, some students) are narrowly focused on employability of graduates, while others (i.e., faculty) consider only “citizenship and life,” to the detriment of more obviously measurable student outcomes. These factors are then used as evidence that we should be concerned about the future of the humanities and of the liberal arts in general.
This kind of alarmism, never far from discourse about the humanities in any time period, has recently been exemplified in a New Yorker essay called “The End of the English Major.” Given these trends, it can even be easy to fall into pessimism and imagine the worst possible outcomes, though I think we can rest assured that no one will be turning our campus into a luxury resort any time soon. It is always worth reminding ourselves—here is one tool from the toolkit again—that considering things on a more granular level is important, since social structures such as class impact what is reported and how, as much regarding this particular problem as others. Organizations such as humanitiesworks.org, which debunks myths about employability and earnings, are another part of the solution.
To my mind, our most fascinating conversations thus far have been about the history and possible futures of the interdisciplinary program in Africana Studies (formerly Black Studies) at Knox and similar programs elsewhere. In these conversations, my much wiser and more knowledgeable colleagues have laid out how this program has always had a tension at its core, a tension between asking penetrating questions that undermine social institutions and promoting the prosperity of individual students as they navigate those institutions in the course of their lives.
To me, this seems to be the problem of the humanities as a whole in microcosm. Being more explicit with our students about how to merge these goals, rather than oppose them, will help more students feel like they belong in our classrooms and like they can make humanist work part of their lives, and even their jobs, after college.
In saying this, I do not mean to minimize the challenges faced by Africana Studies, along with other ethnic studies programs, both in light of racist systems endemic to higher ed and stemming from the specifics of the political moment. Such programs remain vulnerable to closure. In addition to guarding against that outcome, we must also be mindful of attempts to appropriate the humanities and humanistic values—such as intellectual freedom and civic education—in the interest of illiberal ideology. Better communication about the methods of the humanities and their application to social issues can, I hope, help to change the terms of the conversation.
A conclusion
Although our topic may appear broad and not immediately tethered to a concrete social issue like prison abolition, we hope that it is clear that our work “under the hood” of the humanities has much to contribute both within the Abolition for All Time Humanities Lab and across campus. Small tweaks within the classroom, revisions to program curricula, and large-scale changes to students’ perception of their education are all essential to the democratization of higher ed, and the humanities disciplines can and should play a central role in that process.
