Interventions

Welcome to Interventions, an experimental space where authors rehearse new ideas, reframe questions, or play unbridled within Arcade’s field of the humanities in the world. These short posts embrace the incomplete, the imperfect, and the indeterminate, but they may become much more: for example, the record of a thinker’s turn toward a new paradigm or the rough draft of a chapter in a new book. Rapid publication and immediate responses permit Interventions to foster conversation. The tone of the posts may range from personal to political, while maintaining a critical edge. 

Published regularly, Interventions are often freestanding contributions to Arcade, but some may join our feature called Colloquies. Inquiries and submissions are received by the editor of Interventions.


 

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A History of the Humanities at Stanford (5 of 6)

Though many of us are frequently concerned with what we’re currently teaching and why, and though we might have strong opinions about what ought to be taught in the coming years, fewer of us have a comprehensive understanding of how the past century of institutional approaches to curriculum design has contributed to our present circumstances.

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C. L. R. James’s Black Spartacus and the Mediterranean

Ever since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic almost thirty years ago in 1993, C.L.R. James has been seen as a paradigmatic black Atlantic intellectual, and his work – including his classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938) - has often been interpreted...

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Great Books and Global Brutalities (3 of 6)

What is the point of the humanities right now? Do they help us save the world? Become a better person? Develop empathy? Which line of reasoning do we use to justify our own existence to administrators, to students, to donors? This question and its subsidiaries form the center not only within our own discussions at HumCore, but of the larger discussion about core humanities curriculum design in the United States.

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Pedagogy or Catastrophe (2 of 6)
When things fall apart, when societal deterioration accompanies imperial collapse, we become disillusioned, disenchanted, and this emerges in our literature, art, and philosophy. But how might this disillusionment extend to our pedagogy?
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Between Karachi and California: Is Rigor Enough? (1 of 6)
Is methodological rigor all that is necessary to establish a humanities curriculum, or do humanists have a duty to center moral principles in our pedagogy? How might we bridge the two extremes of delineating humanities departments in American universities—rigidly bordered individual fields versus large umbrella programs like the Global Humanities? What could exist between the scales of the local and the global?