Stanford Humanities Center
I have been thinking of this essay as a road map to the ideas and practices of public humanities, a map that would help answer the title question, "why public humanities?" This essay will look at some beginning points for public humanities; work through definitions; talk about the stakes for faculty and students–and the universities and communities in which they work–and consider whether public humanities could be transformative rather than simply translational. No matter how you map public humanities, discussions of collaboration and social justice need to be at the center.
Debates have raged over whether the latest crisis of the humanities is rhetoric or reality. In either case, perceptions matter, and such perceptions have real consequences. So what should be done?
This round table gathers scholars from across disciplines to discuss issues related to epistemic inequality and injustice. From their distinct disciplinary locations, participants address these issues as epistemic justice in the Anglo-American philosophy, as the geopolitics of knowledge and epistemicide in the social sciences, as decolonizing knowledge in Southern Theory, and as perspectivism and cognitive justice in World Literary Knowledges.
In a conversation with our editor, Elaine Treharne reflects on the synergy between Medieval studies and technological innovation, pathbreaking student research at CESTA, and the challenges digital humanists navigate at Stanford.
Jenny Sharpe considers the visual power of the imperial picturesque. Analyzing touristic photography of Indian field workers in the Caribbean, Sharpe argues that a “coolie picturesque” simultaneously reveals and conceals the permanent settlement of Indians and their racial mixing with Afro-Jamaicans.
In June 2003, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh mounted an exhibition of Warhol's iconic Electric Chair print series—ten large-scale prints along with several smaller prints and paintings—as a catalyst to generate discourse on the issue of capital punishment. The project, Andy Warhol's Electric Chairs: Reflecting on Capital Punishment in America, which came two years after the execution of Timothy McVeigh and shortly after the decision by Illinois Governor George Ryan to commute all death sentences in that state, raised significant questions about the social utility and morality of the death penalty.
What do we make of the quantifying impulse in response to danger? What of the affective affordances of putting danger in the form of numbers or visualizations? How do divides in data literacy set up stark material divides when data represents life-threatening dangers?
On May 30th, 2024, as part of the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series, "The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities", at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University, Chiara Palladino from Furman University, Chris Johanson from University of California, Los Angeles, and Eric Harvey from Stanford University talked about the ways they envision 'Ancient Data' and the challenges they face working with it.
Rupert Sparling reviews Timothy Snyder's latest book, On Freedom. How does Snyder conceptualize freedom, and is his framework useful for understanding our contemporary lives and societies? Sparling evaluates Snyder's take on the concept.
