Stanford Humanities Center
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.
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.
Pendant paintings are companion paintings that should hang on a wall together. Two of my favorite are of a married couple by Frans Halls, whose separate treatments might seem sexist at first sight [Fig. 1-2].
She is demure, highly finished, hemmed in by a fashionable ruff and bonnet, perhaps on the...
I don’t usually write about ballroom dance but today I will. My parents (my father and my mother before she passed) have been part of the Asian American ballroom dance community in Southern California since the late 1980s. Like many other first-generation Asian immigrants who came to the US because...
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 offered a...
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?
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.
