How do scholars’ backgrounds and communities inform the research questions they pursue in the humanities? Historian Devin Fergus (NHC Fellow, 2023–24), feminist cultural critic Lynn Mie Itagaki (Resident Associate, 2023–24), and anthropologist Matt Sakakeeny (NHC Fellow, 2023–24) discuss efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy.
The future seems increasingly dire—authoritarianism surging around the globe; accelerating ravages from climate change; deepening political, economic, and cultural divides. Can the humanities help us resolve these challenges and forge a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable world? Panelists ask these questions and others as they ponder what the next ten years hold for the humanities and for us all.
Environmental advocacy work is benefiting from young leaders bringing their humanistic backgrounds to bear on critical issues related to conservation and environmental justice. In this discussion, we consider the role that the humanities can and should play in our collective efforts to preserve the health of our planet and build equitable communities.
How can institutions of higher education reimagine their protocols for faculty advancement to account for the increasing importance of public engagement, collaborative research, and to recognize new interdisciplinary models of intellectual inquiry across humanities fields?
On February 9, 2023, historian Blair L. M. Kelley (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) and political scientist Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (NHC Fellow, 2022–23) opened a conversation at the NHC about “Family as a Knowledge Methodology: Writing Intimate Histories.” Africana religious studies scholar LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant moderated the discussion. These distinguished scholars of African American life discuss how our families teach us about being free and being unfree. They ask, how do our family stories help us think about scholarly knowledge-making? What are the larger stakes of writing about Black families?
Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, Furnace Creek teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues—racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class struggle—that galvanized the world in those decades. Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, Furnace Creek offers a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.
Freedomville is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. But Laura T. Murphy (NHC Fellow, 2017–18), a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery, who spent years researching and teaching about Freedomville, found that whispers and deflections suggested that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar’s success.
Scholars and representatives from state humanities councils reflect on the topics covered during the Crisis of Caring conference and showcase objects, musings, and creative work submitted in advance to our speculative archive by conference participants, attendees, and interested members of the public. This archive collectively imagines a range of possible futures and directions for the health humanities and for medical practice itself.
What role do the arts play in the practice of “the healing arts”? This session, featuring creators and theorists in photography, film, poetry, creative writing, and graphic medicine, explores how innovative creative and arts-based methods are changing both medical practice and medical education.
How do we approach health crises as they affect people from widely disparate cultures? How do we account for the challenges presented by differences in technology and infrastructure? Panelists will explore how national, international, colonial, technological, and economic forces have shaped the ways in which we conceptualize and respond to global health issues.