The search for meaning is at the root of the humanities. It is their raison d’être. In a society that brushes the search for meaning aside, the humanities understandably struggle to thrive. But a renewed interest among society at large in finding meaning—in creating meaningful lives for ourselves—should renew broader interest in the humanities. This can happen if those of us who consider ourselves to be humanities scholars rise to meet the moment.

Concentric Crises and the Search for Meaning: The Humanities in the Time of COVID

In many ways, this volume is predicated upon a series of crises: the “crisis of the humanities,” the crisis of the academic job market, and—most recently and most acutely—the global crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The “crisis of the humanities”—a phrase we use advisedly and with significant reservations—does not have a definitive origin point, though Wayne Bivens-Tatum notes that the first use of the phrase in JSTOR dates back to 1922. Throughout the twentieth century, and into the first two decades of the twenty-first, there have been periodic resurgences of crisis rhetoric around the humanities, such that scholars have felt called to “defend” their disciplines. These earnest defenses of the humanities have revealed a defensiveness, or perhaps a nervous ambivalence, about what we do as humanities scholars and why we do it. Furthermore, the overwhelming rise of critical theory within the disciplines beginning in the 1980s rendered enjoyment and pleasure highly suspect, such that serious students needed to be disciplined away from such approaches. In a system of higher education in which undergraduates are likely to think of themselves more as consumers than as students, a path of study that has been stripped of enjoyment is an understandably hard sell.

The academic job market crisis that followed the 2008 global recession revealed deep fissures in the structure of graduate education. Graduate school in the humanities demands that students make sacrifices that are, first, unevenly distributed across boundaries of race, gender, class, health, and family status; second, not always conducive to producing high-quality intellectual work; third, not reasonable to expect in most professions; and, finally, only ever partially acknowledged by the profession itself. This model was easier for many to accept during the brief post-war period when there was a nearly a one-to-one ratio of academic jobs to graduates, but half a century later, in the context of far fewer jobs and far more graduates,[1] it can only be described, in Lauren Berlant’s terms, as cruelly optimistic.

What, then, has the COVID-19 pandemic revealed? It is impossible now to think about a volume dedicated to graduate education in the humanities without also thinking about the ways in which COVID-19 has disrupted the landscape—not just of graduate education or higher education but also of the world around us. The pandemic has revealed the fragile scaffolding that held together our social infrastructure and has given rise to a wave of reflection about what is meaningful, what we create and cocreate as human beings, and what is worth preserving if we have a choice. It has revealed that many of us were not living lives we enjoyed before the pandemic—that we had commutes, jobs, and social lives that were draining us. It has revealed that the lifestyle of infinite ambition, aspiration, and acquisition that capitalism demands of us is, when we are confronted with our own mortality and death on a mass scale, devoid of meaning. It has revealed the importance of the humanities more powerfully than several decades of debate. In the midst of a multilateral societal reckoning, the demands of this moment—namely, the ability to see from the perspectives of others, the ability to critically analyze texts of all kinds and engage in productive modes of critique, the ability to engage in ethical reasoning and moral decision-making, and the ability to pause and sit inside ambiguity—are decidedly humanistic.

But the moment also demands bravery and a bold, affirmative vision for the future. This is where the academic humanities—embedded within overly cautious institutions and more accustomed to criticizing than to creating—have sometimes fallen short. This volume therefore aims to put into practice a language of affirmation through which the humanities can be reimagined. This hermeneutics of thriving, we hope, will also allow us as humanists to imagine the kind of world we would like to inhabit.

The essays in this volume speak to a broad conversation about how to imagine a graduate education that is driven by thinking rooted in abundance rather than scarcity; by collaboration rather than competition; by a commitment to others, both inside and outside the university; and by a belief in the collective ability to create change. This reimagining is reflected in the three key concepts that guide the volume: engaged curriculum, civic engagement, and joy and well-being. These essays envision humanities scholarship as an engaged and joyful endeavor that rises to meet the challenges of what—judging by the first two decades—may prove to be a very long twenty-first century.

Responding to the Academic Job Market Crisis: The Career Diversity Turn

Before we can begin to tackle the crises of today, we must revisit the crises of a dozen years ago. In 2010, the editors of this volume were both newly minted graduate students in German Studies at Stanford University. The consequences of the 2008 crash were visible, haunting our libraries with the shadows of advanced graduate students who should have finished their degrees and embarked on their careers. Instead, they were lingering in the halls, taking on part-time teaching appointments, research assistantships, and postdoctoral fellowships. They were the lucky ones; Stanford is a well-funded, private university that had the resources and bureaucratic flexibility to keep them on while they waited for the academic market to recover.

And so they waited. And waited.

By the time we were curating our job market materials five years later, even Stanford was not in a position to offer this safety net anymore. The academic job market had crashed before, but it had always at least partially recovered. This time was different. Subsequent editions of the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s Job List show how steeply the numbers of jobs in these fields have declined since the 2008 recession. The most recent report available as of this writing is from 2018–19, in which only 839 jobs in English and 751 jobs in modern languages were posted to the MLA’s Job List (Lusin 1). These numbers represent an increase of 1.3% in the number of jobs posted in English over the previous academic year—the first increase in over half a decade—while other language and literature fields experienced their seventh straight year of decline. Both numbers are at or near the lowest number of jobs posted since the MLA began issuing its report in 1975 and represent a roughly 55% drop since 2007–08, the last year before the recession (1).

It wasn’t yet possible in 2010 to know that jobs would continue to decline so precipitously, but it was possible to see the advanced doctoral students and recent graduates at departmental events and to realize that their lack of prospects would be a serious problem for some time to come. To the credit of our department’s faculty, we began having a conversation about the issue through various forums. One of the most important for both of us was the Humanities Education Focal Group (HEFG), which Jenny (Yevgenya) supported as graduate coordinator for several years under the directorships of Russell Berman and Lisa Surwillo. Hosting speakers on the state of humanities education, HEFG offered an early space to discuss some of the difficult truths facing the profession: the lack of meaningful public engagement, the inequities in access to both graduate education itself and stable employment thereafter, and the pedagogical practices that might be holding us back from addressing these challenges. These discussions were an early example of the kind of proactive para-curriculum that we advocate for in this volume. Indeed, some of the contributors to this volume—namely, Katina Rogers and Sidonie Smith—were once guests of HEFG.

These events also made it increasingly clear that awareness and discussion were not enough. We needed alternative models of professional pathways for humanists. In our third year, Stacy began an internship at the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education, working with Chris M. Golde in an early and decidedly ad hoc version of what has now become a somewhat established practice of administrative internships in some doctoral programs. In this volume, John Lennon’s “The Joy of the Graduate Internship” and Jenna Lay and Emily Shreve’s “Collaborative Ethics: Practicing Engagement in Our Academic Communities” both address such internships.

In discussions with then associate vice provost Golde, Stacy realized she was not alone in wanting more information about careers beyond the professoriate and, moreover, that there were people with PhDs in nearly every office on campus. Over the fall quarter of her third year, Stacy conducted interviews with thirty such PhDs, and from those interviews the Alt-Ac Speaker Series was born. Although “alt-ac” as a term is now falling out of favor, and we prefer to think of “career pathways,” at the time, defining one of those pathways as “alternative academic,” as opposed to “nonacademic,” was a necessary first step. The series brought together panels of staff members with PhDs for lunchtime talks, providing a forum for them to speak openly about their experiences and articulating a metaphorical map of where PhDs were concentrated in administrative positions at Stanford.

The alt-ac conversation at Stanford was part of a larger discourse that was emerging nationally at the time. Although discussion of “alternative” careers for PhDs had been percolating intermittently since at least 1980,[2] Anthony T. Grafton and Jim Grossman’s landmark 2011 op-ed, “No More Plan B,” is often cited as having kicked off the most recent and perhaps most enduring iteration of what we in this volume refer to as the career diversity turn, or the legitimization of expanded and diverse career pathways for humanities PhDs. “No More Plan B” addressed the field of history, but the conversation quickly grew. That same year, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) announced the first round of the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows Competition, a postdoctoral fellowship specifically designed to place humanities PhDs in high-impact roles at nonprofits, NGOs, and other nonacademic organizations. In 2013, the Mellon Foundation funded Humanities without Walls, a consortium of Midwestern universities focused on humanistic approaches to grand challenges and on expanding career pathways for PhDs.

As this network of initiatives and projects expanded, it created a vibrant community of practice—faculty members, students, administrators, and practitioners connected by an evolving conversation about the purpose of doctoral education, the relationship of higher education to the broader public, and the role of the humanities in an increasingly STEM- driven world. This volume includes many members of this community. Teresa Mangum and Jennifer New, for example, have been doing the work of doctoral education transformation at the Obermann Center for the Humanities at the University of Iowa since 2006. Sidonie Smith, a past president of the MLA, published her Manifesto for the Humanities, which called for increasing flexibility in the dissertation and deeper training in scholarly communication, in 2016. Jenna Lay, professor of English at Lehigh University, implemented increased support for job seekers, intensive tracking of alumni, and an administrative internship program for doctoral students. Todd Butler, an English professor and dean at Washington State University, created a program to encourage students to engage with members of the rural communities that surround their campus. Lay’s and Butler’s projects were both supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)’s NextGen Challenge Grants (2016–18)—a short-lived but crucial program that jump-started the conversation at many institutions.

In our own field of literature, the conversation intensified in 2014, when the MLA’s Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature, chaired by our mutual adviser Russell Berman, issued a report. In this report, the members of the task force—all faculty members, albeit from a diversity of institutions—made two recommendations that were explicitly related to the issue of careers beyond the professoriate: first, that doctoral programs should “expand professionalization opportunities” for doctoral students, and second, that they should “validate diverse career outcomes” (“Report” 16, 18). A third recommendation, that programs “use the whole university community,” was less explicit in its prescriptions but no less important (17). This recommendation resonated with the campus-wide approach that Stacy’s Alt-Ac Speaker Series had taken not long before.

This report provided the basis for the MLA’s Mellon-funded Connected Academics program, which began in 2015, with Stacy as project manager, and focused on careers for language and literature PhDs. Along with partnership programs at Georgetown, Arizona State, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Connected Academics sponsored a proseminar in the New York City area that brought together students from ten regional universities. Several years out, proseminar alumni have embarked and are embarking on a variety of exciting careers, both within and beyond the university. Proseminar alumni are currently working for universities in both faculty and administrative roles, as well as in cyber security; diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting; documentary film production; educational technology; government organizations (including the NEH); and much more.

Connected Academics and its sibling grant, Career Diversity, at the American Historical Association, were both very much focused on career pathways. However, a new wave of grants from the Mellon Foundation since 2018 or so, including a grant to the Obermann Center at the University of Iowa for the creation of an interdisciplinary doctoral program called Humanities for the Public Good and a grant to the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), called Transforming Doctoral Education for the Public Good, suggests a new emphasis. Although these grants are interested in helping students create viable career pathways, they are more focused on changing the purpose and structure of doctoral education—and even higher education more broadly—to make these more publicly engaged.

This is not simply a change in rhetoric but a change in philosophy. The new emphasis on “the public good” both acknowledges the ways in which academic disciplines, especially in the humanities, have insulated themselves from the wider world and identifies a unique contribution that our field can make beyond academia. A publicly engaged doctoral student is, by definition, a doctoral student who understands the impact of their work and can communicate its relevance. A publicly engaged doctoral student is better prepared for a career outside the academy but is also better prepared for a different kind of career inside the academy.

That necessity is the mother of invention is a cliché but is also, in this case, true. Had the academic job market not crashed, it is possible that neither of us would be where we are today: Stacy, first at the Graduate Center, CUNY, directing the Mellon-funded PublicsLab and fostering public-facing work in the next generation of PhDs, now a freelance scholar and consultant focusing on graduate education transformation; Jenny, first at the Georgia Institute of Technology in a hybrid role as the designer and associate director of two new professionally focused master’s degrees in applied language and media studies, now at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, designing executive education programs in interdisciplinary global affairs. When we first entered our programs in 2010, neither of us had the ability to imagine these positions or what humanistic work outside the tenure track could look like. However, we both recognized the limits of our imagined futures at the time. Our recognition of an as-yet-unformed broader horizon pushed us to think differently about our own careers and our identities as humanities scholars, writers, teachers, and professionals. The careers we have had since—which are themselves still only in their early stages—have pushed us to think deeply about the purpose and value of our training and to redefine the ecosystem in which we view our work.

The Affirmative Humanities in Yet Another Crisis

The 2008 recession had far-reaching consequences, and the aftershocks are still being felt over a decade later. However, when historians look back, they will likely conclude that that event pales in comparison to the crisis of COVID-19, the effects of which will shape all our lives for decades to come. Some of those changes will be obvious: more people are likely to wear masks on public transit, to stay home (if they can afford to) when they’re sick, and to work from home at least a few days a week. Other changes are less obvious but perhaps more profound. Among them are the sudden fissures that have erupted in the relationships between individuals and their institutions.

Lindsey Ellis, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, called it “The Great Disillusionment”: “College employees are . . . re-evaluating how work fits into their lives — a striking development for a field that thinks of itself as a calling and has long been seen as a stable employer with solid benefits.” Although Ellis does not go so far as to identify a lack of trust between individuals and their institutions as the issue at hand, it is clear that the inability—or unwillingness—of institutions of higher education to treat their employees with dignity, to respect their time and outside responsibilities, and to reward them in tangible ways has a great deal to do with the decision many are making to leave the field. Ellis identifies student affairs and other student-facing positions as being particularly at risk, since they tend to be low-paid positions that demand high levels of care. Many of those positions are more arduous now, Ellis notes, and students are returning to campus more anxious and depressed and less motivated than before the pandemic. Similarly, although many faculty members are eager to return to in-person instruction, the less-than-ideal circumstances under which they’re doing so have caused many to ask whether it is truly worth the risk.

Although this is not a problem specific to the humanities, the fissures that have erupted between the institutions in which the humanities are embedded and nurtured and the people who work there are critical to thinking about the future of graduate education—not least because many humanities PhDs start their careers in teaching or administrative roles at universities. In short, no matter how much we may love our institutions, our institutions cannot love us back, nor can they always care for us in the ways we want and need.

COVID has also shown us the difference between doing the work of the humanities and upholding humanities institutions. It has become increasingly clear how often the two are conflated, particularly in moments of crisis. The crisis of the humanities—which was and is largely a crisis of the academic humanities—precipitated calls for saving humanities departments and preserving institutional spaces. But these are not the only spaces where the humanities exist. There is a much broader humanities ecosystem beyond academia, in which people continue to do the work of the humanities, often unacknowledged by academic humanists or even derided as “not really humanities.” And it is those parts of the humanities ecosystem that are poised to help people deal with a crisis of meaning on the scale of this pandemic, perhaps far better than the academic humanities currently are. If we in the academic humanities want to be a part of that conversation, we must think beyond the preservation of our institutions. Moreover, we must be willing to be transformed by that work—and to allow our disciplines to also be transformed in service of making it possible. For those of us who are accustomed to operating within a single framework, this transformation can be uncomfortable but is also liberating.

One of the impediments to our field’s engagement with the search for meaning is the academic humanities’ culture of skepticism. The rhetoric of crisis and critique that has dominated the discourse on humanities-as-vocation reflects a broader tendency in the humanities of the latter half of the twentieth century. As a number of critics, including Rita Felski, Eve Sedgwick, and Bruno Latour, have argued, the academic humanities emerged from the last century with a powerful ethos of skepticism and critique but with few tools to articulate affirmation, purpose, and well-being. Felski points to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion as a style of reading that came to dominate humanistic research after the era of the world wars. In this framework, a literary critic’s “self-appointed task is to draw out where a text fails—or willfully refuses—to see” (Felski 1). As a legacy of the Deconstruction era, the hermeneutics of suspicion is “a style of interpretation that is driven by a spirit of disenchantment” that, according to Felski, pervades in our academic culture “across differences of field and discipline” (2). Indeed, grad students in a seminar are often asked to use terms like fault lines, limitations, and breaking points to describe an argument, emphasizing the failures and limitations of humanistic work. The hermeneutic of suspicion and their emotional effects on the overall field of literary studies are elaborated in Donald Moores’s essay in this volume, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Literary Study at the Graduate Level.”

To be sure, a critical deconstructive stance has been an essential tool for dismantling hierarchies and recognizing the consequences of unconscious bias, privilege, and hegemony. Ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies have often given people—especially young people—language for describing themselves and their circumstances and for pushing back against oppressive social forces. Even the backlash against critical race theory that emerged on the far right in the summer of 2021 is itself a testament to the social impact of humanities research over the last half-century. We do not mean to undermine the importance of critique, both in the academic humanities and beyond, for envisioning a more just future. On the contrary, those of us who are engaged in this work must acknowledge and honor the work of Black feminist scholars and activists who have demonstrated the importance of pairing critique with vision. Scholars and activists such as bell hooks, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya Hartman, Patricia Hill Collins, and Angela Davis, in their work on education, prison abolition, or the overlap between the two, employ rigorous critique in creating a radical re-envisioning of institutions and our relationship to them that is not only equitable but liberatory. However, the work of Black feminist scholars has often not been honored by the academy. Among many possible examples, the case of Lorgia García Peña’s 2019 tenure denial at Harvard stands out for having burst into the mainstream. In the New Yorker article about García Peña’s case, Graciela Mochkofsky writes, “Harvard does not disclose the reasons for its tenure decisions, but a few faculty members had expressed reservations about García Peña’s work—most notably, that it was activism rather than scholarship, a criticism that is often levelled against scholars of ethnic studies.” The assumption that activism is not and cannot be scholarly— that scholarship and activism in fact exist at opposite poles—remains pervasive, and it may account for the fact that in many graduate programs at predominantly white institutions, critique is not coupled with a radical sense of possibility or vision but rather with skepticism. Skepticism trains students in the essential ability to see a concept from all sides and entertain multiple points of view, but it also risks creating a culture of disenchantment and disassembly that perpetually negates and empties out its own reality.

The humanities are not unique in their struggle to replant the razed fields of meaning left by the twentieth century’s posttraumatic skepticism. The social sciences and natural sciences are also experiencing a paradigm shift that yearns for the restoration of affirmative meaning to our work. As Martin Seligman noted in his president’s address to the American Psychological Association back in 1999, the field of psychology, like the humanities, spent the latter half of the twentieth century “healing damage” and learning “how people survive and endure under conditions of adversity” (560). This has yielded tremendous progress in the treatment of pathology, “[y]et we have scant knowledge of what makes life worth living” (560). Some progress has been made in this area in the last twenty years; scholars of well-being like Brené Brown and Arthur Brooks have become widely known in the public sphere, and their work on vulnerability and happiness is regularly featured in mainstream media.[3] Now, the humanities find themselves at a similar crossroads. Alongside the sharp eye of critique, we must imagine the humanistic tools of reconstruction, affirmation, and sustenance that can pierce the emptiness.

As academics and as humanists, we are faced with the task that follows after recognition—that messy, precarious challenge of imagining and creating a better future. We call upon our profession to not stop at clearing the rubble of human society’s failures but also to take the risk of building meaning and value within that society. In this volume, we would like to propose an affirmative humanities—an approach to humanistic work that has the capacity to build. We take it as a given that a humanistic education has value beyond our disciplines and institutions and that professionals with humanistic training can—and already do— contribute significantly to all sectors of society and industry. But what would a hermeneutics of affirmation look like in the context of graduate education? What are the intellectual projects and pedagogical structures of an affirmative humanities? And what would the relationship of our institutions be to these projects?

To that end, this volume takes as its premise that the humanities do not exist solely in the academic space at all and that academia is rather one component of a much broader and highly dynamic ecosystem. The “humanities sector” or “humanities ecosystem,” as it is sometimes called, comprises all the many places in which humanistic work gets done. Academic humanities departments operate in a space that includes museums and archives, public and academic libraries, humanities centers, public humanities councils, humanities-focused foundations, scholarly associations, cultural nonprofits, and K–12 education. Our ecosystem also includes think tanks, policy institutes, and for-profit companies in communications, media, consulting, cultural programming, and organizational change management. The humanities ecosystem imagines the humanities in the broadest sense, both as a set of questions or interests having to do with human relationships, language, and culture and as a set of tools that include qualitative methodologies, textual analysis, and historical and cultural contextualization.

One of the key contributions of this volume is that we embrace the full scope of the humanities ecosystem, and the majority of the essays in this volume describe work that engages in some form of dialogue with this sector. Understanding of and strong engagement with the humanities ecosystem are crucial for sustaining and reimagining our future. A lack of familiarity with the full scope of the humanities sector leads both faculty members and students to underestimate their professional worth and the myriad ways in which they can contribute to society, find meaningful work, and create value. It compounds the sense—pervasive in academia and, as we hope to show, counterproductive—of the humanities as a whole being in crisis. It elides the fact that humanities knowledge production and knowledge transmission (otherwise known as research and teaching) happen in a multitude of places, many of which are sites not of crisis but of thriving. And it obscures the opportunities that exist—especially now, when so many of us are searching for meaning and attempting to make sense of our lives—for expanding that ecosystem and carving out new spaces for ourselves and for others.

Expanding the Humanities Ecosystem: Zora’s Daughters and Edge Effect

To illustrate what this might look like, we reached out to several current graduate students who are engaged in expanding the greater humanities ecosystem in ways that we find innovative and exciting. They are examples of what we might think of as humanities entrepreneurship: new ventures that are rooted in humanistic values and ways of thinking.[4]

Zora’s Daughters

Alyssa A. L. James and Brendane Tynes, doctoral students in anthropology at Columbia University, created the Zora’s Daughters podcast in 2020. Tynes and James describe the project as “a society and culture podcast that uses Black feminist anthropology to think about race, politics, and popular culture” (“About”). They consider the podcast to be “an un-apologetic contribution to the movement for Black liberation” and hope that their listeners, “from many walks of life . . . will feel inspired to bring Black feminist principles to their families, friends, workplaces—wherever they gather” (e-mail interview). In its third season as of 2023, Zora’s Daughters remains firmly rooted in the discipline of anthropology, as James and Tynes use their platform to amplify the work of Black feminist anthropologists in their ICONversations, discuss current events such as the death of Queen Elizabeth (“Death”) and the fall of Roe v. Wade (“Looting”), provide support to fellow graduate students of color (“Notes” and “It’s Not You”), and continue to lift up the contributions of Zora Neale Hurston, specifically in anthropology (“Practicing” and “We Call Her Zora”).

The origins of the project lie with the little-known fact that Hurston herself was once a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia. It was that connection to Hurston, and its omission from most discussions of her biography, that prompted James to come up with the idea for the podcast in 2020.

Centering communities, producing and communicating knowledge in ways that are accessible, reviving forgotten narratives and histories, and bringing people into conversations from which they have traditionally been excluded are all ideas central to the project of Zora’s Daughters— and to how James and Tynes see the humanities at work in that project. In an e-mail conversation about the podcast, its creators emphasized that “[h]umanities scholarship traditionally invokes a universal definition of the ‘human’ that excludes Black women, Black queer and trans people, Black children, and others.” In contrast, Zora’s Daughters “critiques this universal understanding and brings forth viewpoints that are erased. We highlight Black women’s, Black queer and trans people’s agency, our right to determine our own meaning and to shaping our own lives.” This work is a clear example of the sort of envisioning that Black feminist scholars have been doing for many years and that the academy has persistently undervalued (when it has recognized it at all).

Indeed, James and Tynes are clear that this project not only exists beyond the scope of their institution but also resists the culture of hierarchy, prestige, and exclusion that is endemic to the academic humanities (particularly at elite institutions like Columbia). They seek to “break apart parochial understandings of ‘human’ and challenge hierarchies of knowledge” while at the same time “bring[ing] those who are often excluded from scholarly conversations—despite being the subjects of those studies—into them by making that knowledge accessible.” Furthermore, they say, “Zora’s Daughters is a space where we assert and affirm that we are the authors and theorists of our own lives, regardless of whether we are authorized by the academy” (e-mail interview). In other words, the Zora’s Daughters podcast seeks to repair the violence that has been perpetrated by the university itself, and in so doing, imagine better and more just possibilities for its creators, their peers, the academy, and the world.

Edge Effect

Jessica Applebaum and Nicolas Benacerraf are graduate students in theater and performance studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and fellows with the PublicsLab. They describe their organization, Edge Effect (edgeeffectmedia.org), as “a think-and-do tank that designs hybrid performances, across media, for the public good.” Repurposing methods from theater practice, Edge Effect brings together “performers, designers, scholars, scientists, journalists, activists, technologists, funders, and organizers in the creation of works that resist and demystify the mechanisms of mass persuasion in contemporary corporate culture” (Applebaum and Benacerraf). What the resulting work looks like varies wildly, as it is responsive to the collaborators and communities involved. Applebaum and Benacerraf say that the possibilities include “live performances, online videos, psychosocial experiments, hoax storefronts, immersive installations, theatrical lectures, and white papers—all designed to live at the intersection of analysis, enigma, spectacle, and delight.”

The origin story of Edge Effect goes back to 2013, when Benacerraf and Applebaum served together on the organizing committee of the Brooklyn Commune, an artist-driven and -directed study of the economic landscape of the performing arts in the United States. In 2014, they collaborated with other artists in producing Happiness Machine, “a mock storefront in midtown Manhattan that played mischievously with the family imagery that gets slapped onto all sorts of products during the holiday season.” Applebaum and Benacerraf write:

[Happiness Machine] was our first effort to play with the materiality of Public Relations as a covert genre of persuasive performance, which hides its underlying logic from the public(s) whose behavior it wishes to alter. Not only did our immersive storefront give people an uncanny experience of encountering an overload of Christmas imagery at the wrong time of year, but it became a place for community gathering—a truly public space for individuals to take refuge with no expectation of commercial exchange.

Happiness Machine opened the door to a number of subsequent collaborations and eventually led to Edge Effect, a project Applebaum and Benacerraf, who understand public relations (PR) as an industry “dedicated to widening existing power imbalances,” describe as a “transdisciplinary critique of PR power.” Indeed, the work of Edge Effect is predicated upon a complex analysis of power, both present-day and historical, and that analysis drives the principles of the work and of the organization.

The humanities are alive and well not only in the content of the work that Applebaum, Benacerraf, and their collaborators (who include other graduate students) have done but also in how they do it. They have built the organization slowly, in a way they hope will allow for its lasting sustainability. At its heart is a spirit of radical collaboration between and among people from many different disciplines. The name Edge Effect refers to unique natural phenomena that occur when ecosystems touch at their very edges. They have a practice of “gatherings,” the first of which took place in November 2020, to bring new people into the community—what they call “collective onboarding”— while at the same time creating space to imagine collectively the future of their work together.

There is something decidedly utopian but far from naive about Edge Effect. Its founders hope “to intentionally rebuild culture, piece by piece, around the human scale” so as to create a system that “would give us all more time and resources for our collective nourishment” (Applebaum and Benacerraf). This is an enormous undertaking, but it is also very much in line with the situation described earlier in this introduction: the feeling that a culture of infinite aspiration, ambition, and acquisition (perpetuated, in Applebaum and Benacerraf’s analysis, by PR culture) is failing us and has been for some time, leaving us drained of time and energy, isolated from those we love, and searching for meaning. Under these circumstances, an endeavor like Edge Effect seems especially timely. It demonstrates, furthermore, the ways in which the humanities could and should intervene in these conversations.

Edge Effect and Zora’s Daughters, for all their differences, share particular attributes: they are collaborative, publicly engaged, and ambitious about effecting real change in the world. Unfortunately, the academy still does not always know what to do with projects like these. Applebaum and Benacerraf are quick to note that they have felt supported by their own program through independent studies, mentoring, and an openness to connecting research and practice. However, this remains the exception rather than the rule. Graduate students, especially in places like New York City, have always had side gigs, often in direct contravention of university policies about how much they should work while receiving a stipend from the university.[5] In the past, there has been more or less a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” around these side gigs, which has the consequence that many departments simply don’t know what their graduate students are doing. They don’t know that a student is doing translation and cross-cultural consulting for Netflix, for example, or that several students have come together to found a bilingual publishing company. They don’t know that someone has started a nonprofit or a really stellar podcast or a YouTube channel based on their research.

On the one hand, this ignorance is preventive. No one wants the oppressive apparatus of the university to come down on moonlighting graduate students who are trying to make ends meet. On the other hand, none of the examples we just gave—all of which are pulled from real life—can really be reduced to “moonlighting.” They are substantive intellectual projects that push at the boundaries of the humanities ecosystem and create new and fascinating possibilities for being a scholar in the world. Ignoring the work being done beyond the borders of the university by the next generation of scholars creates the illusion that that work doesn’t exist. It makes it appear as though the humanities live and die with the university, when in fact that is not and has never been the case. Rather, the humanities challenge the policies, hierarchies, and economies of the university itself—and that might, in fact, be the true crux of the issue. Institutions have their own agendas, methods of self-protection, and ways of working in their own best interests. Those of us who are, for better or worse, institutionalists are ethically bound to confront the ways in which the interests of the institution and the interests of the people in them are not always one and the same. COVID has highlighted this more starkly than any other recent crisis.

This volume is about humanities graduate education. The humanities writ large, we are increasingly convinced, are not in crisis. Graduate education, however, is another story—a turbulent and unfinished story. The future of graduate studies in the humanities is still being written, and we are at an inflection point. This volume attempts to document that inflection point—to capture a system in flux and to share some of the innovations and reflections that have already taken place—while pointing toward a thriving future.

The Future of Graduate Education in the Humanities

This volume is not simply a response to the pragmatic need for new employment opportunities and broader professional pathways for those with humanities training. This volume offers an intellectual framework for thinking about graduate education in the humanities differently. We hope it provides you with the inspiration and resources you need, wherever you are in your career and in relation to the humanities ecosystem, to think about your work as a humanist in new ways. We have chosen to curate the collected essays in three sections that speak to what we believe are the pillars of affirmative graduate education in the humanities moving forward: an engaged curriculum that asks the hard questions and meets students where they are, a commitment to civic engagement and the power of the humanities to do good in the world, and a foundation of joy and well-being, the connective tissue of a meaningful life.

We believe we are in a transitional moment in graduate education that renders this volume of necessity incomplete. The essay by Marcia James, which explores the importance of humanities training far afield from academia, pushes the boundaries of the humanities ecosystem as we hope to see many more humanists do in the future. There is also much more to be said about how we might center social and racial justice in both graduate education and in our discussion of “the public good.” The humanities ecosystem, broadly construed, should be deeply concerned with issues of equity and willing to turn its critical lens back on itself. In this volume, Todd Butler, Tabitha Espina, and Richard Snyder explore the challenges of a land grant institution, with all its history of colonialist expansion, in forging a reciprocal connection with the local Indigenous community, while Stacy Hartman and Bianca Williams consider the importance of joy and well-being for racial equity in graduate programs. Similarly, Will Fenton’s essay provides an example of how to use humanities scholarship to challenge and rewrite hegemonic narratives, in this case in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Beyond the ways in which this volume’s essays address issues of race and equity in graduate education, we hope and expect to see racial equity and social justice truly centered in current and future discussions about how to holistically transform graduate education.

Graduate students are often well ahead of their programs in advocating for such transformations. There are generational tensions in departments, manifesting in arguments over departmental core courses, reading lists, and dissertation formats and topics. Faculty members can see how far a field has come, while graduate students often see how far there still is to go. But the importance of the current generation of graduate students in manifesting a more just and equitable future for the humanities is visible in the essays in this volume that are contributed by such students. In particular, the concluding essay, “Radical Collegiality and Joy in Graduate Education,” coauthored by six Rice University graduate students, articulates both the promise and the challenge of a new kind of graduate education—one that is collaborative and joyful, in which many kinds of people can succeed, and where many types of success are possible and celebrated. This type of graduate education reaches beyond the bounds of the department or the institution and contributes to a better society. It is a version of graduate education that represents a distinct shift into a new moment: a turn away from thinking about the PhD as an individual, private journey and toward an exploration of how we—meaning the broadest possible scholarly community within the humanities ecosystem—might contribute to an affirmative vision of the future in which many more of us can thrive and flourish.

The hypothetical university the six coauthors devised, “Ecalpon U” (which includes the words “no place” spelled backward), also reminds those of us who are engaged in graduate education as faculty members and administrators that the gravity of creating a better world does not lie solely in our students’ promise of creative reimaginings and future goals. It also lies with us and our practices right now. What are we doing to create a “place” for them? What do we owe to the next generation of professional humanists? How do we hold ourselves accountable to them? We have serious and pressing responsibilities to those who are, right now, entrusting us with their lives and their futures as well as their education. We also have the tools and knowledge to do right by them.

Let’s begin.

Notes

[1]David Laurence, writing for the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s office of research, noted in 2017 that even as the number of academic jobs in modern languages continued to drop, the number of PhDs earned continued to grow.

[2]The “glut” of humanities PhDs and their nonacademic job prospects was the subject of a New York Times piece as long ago as 31 December 1980, during an MLA Annual Convention in New York City. The article, written by William K. Stevens, cites “a shift in the relationship of humanities scholars to the rest of society, and in many of the scholars’ perceptions of their own roles.” This shift was and remains incomplete.

[3] Brené Brown is a scholar of empathy and courage at the University of Texas in Houston; her TED Talk on vulnerability and bravery is now a Netflix special and shaped the mainstream discourse on empathy in 2020. Arthur Brooks, of Harvard University, produces numerous podcasts and columns on “how to build a happy life” and is widely recognized as a public expert on happiness.

[4] We are aware that some of our readers will consider “humanities entrepreneurship” a contradiction in terms. Having earned our degrees at Stanford, we understand the ways in which “entrepreneurship” as a concept has been co-opted by Silicon Valley, but that version of entrepreneurship need not be the only one. Entrepreneurship can mean simply creating something that hasn’t previously existed or carving out spaces for people who haven’t traditionally had spaces provided for them. We hope that our readers will sit with their initial reactions to putting “humanities” and “entrepreneurship” side by side and consider whether the friction that exists between the two concepts might be a generative one.

[5] These policies, which often tell graduate students that they are not allowed to work more than eight to ten hours per week, both infantilize students and ignore the economic reality they inhabit.

Works Cited