I'm not dead yet. Updates!

Hello all! A long overdue update on the Emergent Humanities project.

So, in early 2024, I published interviews here with brilliant colleagues. Then, in March 2024, I sheltered in place at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and over the course of two weeks morphed all of the wisdom into a book-length manuscript with work-book like features: something colleagues could use to get unstuck and thinking about our work in generative ways. I also scheduled a talk about the project and our times at SDSU's Digital Humanities Center for early 2025, but postponed for many reasons stemming from January 2025 (thank you, SDSU colleagues, for your graciousness). I finally finished writing it in July or August but have no plans to give it yet.

I’ll share a snippet of it here:

Over the last seven months especially, I have been paying attention to how colleagues at my university are paying attention to what is now breaking us.  For in the last seven months we have together experienced seismic shifts in the contexts that have shaped the way we talk about our work as professors, revealing the limitations and even falsenesses of assumptions that have guided higher education in the United States for decades. These limitations have been known to and observed by attentive thinkers in the humanities–both US-based and global (thinking here about indigenous and postcolonial theorists, and recent summative work by Sylvia Wynter and Boaventura de Sousa Santos)–for decades. But we in the humanities have not  (for a number of reasons) been able to communicate them effectively to our colleagues, our institutions, and even our students.  Moreover, the dynamics of the institutional contexts in which we now work have distorted the kinds of conversations that should be taking place across disciplines within what the AAUP Statement of Professional Ethics describes as “the community of scholars,” and across operational divisions within universities. So it is that we find ourselves in this seismically shifted context working within institutional relational infrastructures that are imbalanced, overextended, and strained.  

Imbalanced, overextended, and strained relationships are not a condition particular to institutions of higher education, of course.  It is a general condition, the cumulative consequence of many generations of dislocation, displacement, and knowledge loss which have resulted in a deep impoverishment in our knowledge about how to  be human, how to think and talk together towards livable shared futures, an impoverishment that becomes even more stark when considered against excesses of data, images, and signals which saturate our beings like the forever chemicals and microplastics that now saturate our bodies, blood, and milk. It is possible to be saturated with data and yet impoverished in knowing.

I offer an accounting of our shared impoverishment not in the spirit of critique, or in service to some simple formulation of resistance, but in service to “seeking and stating truth as we understand it,” which as professors in our AAUP Statement of Professional Ethics we hold in common as our defining purpose.  In the humanities, we have been working for decades to find an authentic way of “not talking falsely” about loss, crisis, and contradiction as constitutive of modern human experience. We have done so even as our colleagues in other disciplines have been working ever more feverishly to produce incremental, propositional, positivistic findings that build somewhere, to something, that approximates a common good.  And yet in the humanities we know that incremental, propositional, postivistic science is itself embedded in and cooperative with the same human systems that have also produced loss, displacement, estrangement, distortion, and oblivion. How do we navigate these contradictions–contradictions now coming due as crises– towards relationships that can sustain us? 

The work of acknowledging and attending to crises and contradictions is work that of all the disciplines only humanities has rigorously prepared itself to do.  In the humanities, we have for many years used the word “criticism,” deriving from left Hegelianism, to caption our work in relation to crisis.  But the way we have done it over the last few decades–primarily, as critique–has not positioned us to communicate our knowledge effectively to our colleagues and the institutions in which we work.  Criticism alone degenerates over time.  Criticism alone cannot generate the commonalities and solidarities essential to sustainable human futures.  To be in generative relationship to crisis requires both rigorous decomposition but also invested attention and imagination, work described by Saidiya Hartman as critical fabulation, or historian Sara Johnson as countertextualization or communal biography, or by arts theorist Natalie Loveless as research-creation, or by Boaventura de Sousa Santos as corazonar–the rehabilitative “warming up” of reason, or even, as I have argued, as a zone of dissenting post-secular theology. Humanities teaching and scholarship can and should exercise its capacity to be in relationship to crisis in ways that prioritize human belonging and, as Sarah Song has written, shared agency. It can, as described by UCSD Provost Wayne Yang under his alias la paperson, contribute to the building of a third university which processes abandoned and decomposing spoils of land-grant and Cold War institutionalization into new relationships and new shared understandings.

When I talk about the work of the humanities as being in generative relationship to crisis, I want to be clear that I am not talking about the “crisis in the humanities” that has been floated as a storyline in the shallows of higher education for decades. To the contrary, if we pay serious attention to institutional histories of American higher education, especially at its public university systems, we find quite the opposite–that humanities have created sustaining conditions for American higher education.  And they have done so in and through their reparative relationship to crisis.

National Humanities Center continues to be an incredible partner, and I celebrate the news that the Center just welcomed Dr. Blair Kelley as its new president and director. I can share that NHC and another key partner will convene a pilot emergent humanities summit for invited university leaders this December. Invitees have agreed to come to North Carolina for a collective imagining of how humanities work and methodologies can be an asset to leadership in these times--informed entirely by this project--with the follow-on goal of activating ACLS / NHC to support the generative-beyond-critique (but not uncritical), wise, collective, agile knowing that only humanities cultivates.

I know a lot of us are (in the words of my heart-hero Woody Guthrie, who was born in the same town, month, and year as my grandma Dorothy) going down the road feeling bad right now. I take pride in the fact our rich archive of human knowingness is an excellent traveling companion in such times.