Shifting Contexts
Hub and Spokes: The Mechanics of Locating the Humanities at the Center of the University
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Judd Ruggill
I consider humanities institutionally, that is, in terms of their place in the geography and machinery of the modern university. While the humanities have been pushed to the margins over the last half century by neoliberalism and techno-science, they’re now in a remarkable position to return to the functional center of the institution as a hub to which the spokes of all fields of human inquiry connect. I’m not speaking abstractly or theoretically here, but rather instrumentally: the humanities can function as an economic and pedagogical engine for STEM, business, informatics—indeed any of the more professionally-oriented or practical fields that have displaced the humanities in higher education. I’d like to use the University of Arizona’s Applied Humanities degree as a springboard for this idea, as it represents a surprisingly successful humanities-centric partnership that encompasses more than half of the undergraduate-serving colleges on campus. I review the actual mechanics (not just the theory or the desire) of articulating the humanities with skills training in business, health, design, and other professional fields, and how the institutional leadership in these other areas at the University of Arizona have come to depend on their new friends in the College of Humanities (financially, rhetorically, and creatively).
When Homo Economicus Became Homo Narrans : Reading, and Repurposing Economics
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Simon Frost
The tradition of anti-instrumentality, as Caroline Levine puts it, has helped defend the integrity of humanities’ disciplines, but this withdrawal from Zweckrationalität has an undesirable side effect, which is to abandon large areas of human endeavour to modelling by disciplines of science-technology, most eagerly by neo-classical economics. However, neo-classical economics is neither as rational nor as science-technology based as one might think; noted in the critical commentary of its ‘physics envy’. Key concepts to economic modelling – the sovereign individual (homo economicus) and rational choice – can be challenged, and economics does little to admit that economic decision making is saturated in race, gender, and class. But nowhere are neo-classical limitations more evident than in ideas of consumption and specifically the consumption of symbolic goods – in this paper’s case study, the consumption of ‘books’. Price and demand under conditions of scarcity clearly cannot account for the cultural, aesthetic value of symbolic goods, but neither can these parameters adequately model those same goods as purchasable items. Instead, value as an entwined market and cultural value must be thought of as something created through the symbol’s reading, and thus, for symbolic goods, reading becomes the correct term for what economics calls consumption. The proposal has potential consequences for many aspects of our branded economy and reconfigures homo economicus to who she really is, homo narrans. If economics is merely the mathematised wing of a particular cultural political way of thinking, then humanities reading studies could readily assist in a political-economic re-alignment.
The Pursuit of Literary Self-expression in the Master’s Language: Issues of Political Autonomy and Socio-Cultural Sustainability in Pakistani English-language Writers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Waqas Khwaja
My paper focuses on Pakistani writers who have chosen to write in the English language in their quest for creative self-expression and self-actualization. I study the phenomenon by surveying the work of selected poets and fiction writers from Pakistan in order to delineate and assess the possible influences and consequences of their choice and to determine the nature of their relationship to the medium of their creative expression. In the process, I address the following questions, among others, with an aim to discover ways and means of recuperating the socio-cultural resources necessary to the health of a pluralistic, polyglossic society that the choice of the Master’s language may have compromised: What is at stake when an implanted language is deployed for creative and personal self-expression? Is the use of such a language, to begin with, a matter of choice, or a function of one’s class and environment? Is it a burden in itself, or release from the burden of one’s cultural identity or identities? What is the relationship of the adopted, grafted language to the vernacular, or vernaculars native to the place and its people? And how far is it possible to shape the implanted language to make it serve the purposes, needs, and aspirations (creative, as also personal and political) of the people to whom it is neither endemic nor natal, in that it lacks the social practice, cultural symbology and markers of allusion for the original and spontaneous speech communities to which it is introduced?
