Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper’s purpose is to investigate how the humanities might help build more livable futures. My method is to examine the ways that interdisciplinary approaches to literary studies and media studies could nurture conceptual frameworks capable of responding to global crises like the climate emergency and war, particularly amid the increasing risk of a nuclear conflagration. Among the texts my paper discusses are Ewa Domańska’s, “Prefigurative Humanities,” Yoshihisa Kashima’s, “Cultural Dynamics for Sustainability,” James Purdon’s, “Literature—Technology—Media,” and Fern Thompsett’s, “Pedagogies of Resistance.” I contend that the humanities must address the present conjuncture by employing what Domańska calls “future-oriented humanities . . . guided by the idea of critical hope and epistemic justice (understood as the inclusion of knowledges created in ‘epistemic peripheries’).” These “epistemic peripheries,” I argue, include sites of knowledge production such as alternative media outlets, independent literary presses, social movements, and free universities. The latter can be especially generative incubators of liberatory thought considering their capacity to, as Thompsett writes, foster “emancipatory praxes through ‘prefiguration’ - that is, building better worlds in the here-and-now through ongoing experimentation.” If humanities research prioritizes engaging with these “epistemic peripheries,” it might be possible to, in Kashima’s words, “develop cultures of sustainability that highlight and reward the ideas and practices that will help us transition to a sustainable lifestyle,” one that is necessarily also characterized by peace. Adopting such directions for humanities studies could enable ways of knowing, and of making knowledge, suitable to this century’s most urgent challenges.