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.

 

Dark and mysterious etching featuring four human figures with bat-like flying apparatuses.
Ageing for Beginners: An Unrepresentative Guide
By
Richard Read
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?
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Allegorical Figure of Faith by Giovanni Battista Gaulli
Ratzinger on Epistemology and History
By

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...

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Educating the Silicon Citizen: Literature, Philosophy, and the Case for Slow Tech
By
Presumably, it has never been a good time for the Humanities. Perhaps because it is simply in the nature of the discipline to find itself perpetually in crisis, lagging behind the times, dragging its leaden feet made out of indelible words, asking for more and more time in a civilization perpetually in a rush. It is constantly on the edge of a precipice, but we cannot deny that, while it is awkwardly balancing itself on the edge, it does enjoy magnificent views. After all, our field does not thrive on security, on solid facts, on controlled experiments with measurable outcomes.
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Space and Place, the remix (6 of 6)
By
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?
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A History of the Humanities at Stanford (5 of 6)
By
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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Great Books and Global Brutalities (3 of 6)
By
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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