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.


 

Image by Byron Browne; Graphic Design by Sheena Lai
By
Lin Li
In September 2017, a memorial dedicated to survivors of the "comfort women" system was unveiled in downtown San Francisco. As the largest modern sexual slavery system, the "comfort women" system was created and overseen by the Imperial Japanese Government between 1931 and 1945.
Image by Marcus Johnstone; Graphic Design by Sheena Lai
Hope in the Anthropocene: A Case for Eco-Collectivism

The novel has the capacity to encapsulate human existence, enabling us to interrogate our existing modes of being in the world, while imagining alternatives. Fiction can also represent or envisage the need for a collective activism, comprising both humans and more-than-humans, to face the planetary...

Allegorical Figure of Faith by Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Ratzinger on Epistemology and History

Was Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, more of a “Franciscan” than the Jesuit Bergolio, Pope Francisco?

One key to Ratzinger's world is his study of St Bonaventure, the 7th Franciscan General at a time when radical Joachimite spirituals had taken over the Franciscan order in the 1200s. Ratzinger...

Dark and mysterious etching featuring four human figures with bat-like flying apparatuses.
Ageing for Beginners: An Unrepresentative Guide
We all know we can move between ages: the bank manager and the brain surgeon screaming in the members' stand at the football club, the sombre academic taking to ecstatic dance at the post-conference night club, the OAP who falls in love, the police people hiding tats beneath their uniforms. Does this pin-ball capacity to flick between several different ages we carry ready and waiting their turn within ourselves serve any evolutionary purpose?
Space and Place_1.jpg
Space and Place, the remix (6 of 6)
As we close out this series of reports on the Humanities Core (HumCore) Workshops, it is worth returning to the two questions that have driven every session so far: 1. Can we conceptualize the Global Humanities at all? 2. How have our ideas created teaching structures in California, Karachi, and Singapore?