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.
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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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?
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Poetry for a Time of Plague
The most powerful depiction of illness in Elizabethan London was a lyric poem by the urban pamphleteer and stylistic experimentalist Thomas Nashe, who probably died of the plague around 1600.