Einführung - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Einführung

Carin Berkowitz, Norman Bradburn &
Robert B. Townsend

T here are several reasons that this is an opportune time to examine the

state of the humanities. Over the past decade, there have been a num-
ber of reports on the health and value of the humanities, led, Natürlich,
by the American Academy’s report, The Heart of the Matter,1 but those qualitative
investigations have been supplemented in recent years by the release of impor-
tant new empirical data on the humanities, including two national surveys by the
Academy’s Humanities Indicators (on the status of departments at four-year col-
leges and the attitudes of the general public about the field)2 as well as a deep text
analysis carried out by the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University
of Miami, and California State University, Northridge, which analyzes commen-
tary about the humanities in the press and social media. The findings from these
studies bring important new evidence to bear on the state of the humanities both
as an academic enterprise and as a social good, and are described in greater detail
in this volume. Darüber hinaus, as this volume goes to press, the past two years point
to the vital role the humanities play in society. To name just two recent exam-
ples, this role surfaced in public efforts to understand and respond to the human
dimensions of pandemics and policing, as well as the contested histories of the
United States and the world. The responses to these challenges could have a trans-
formative effect on public perceptions of the humanities, but only if both practi-
tioners and audiences understand better what the humanities are and what role
they play in the world around them. The field needs to build bridges between its
disciplines and its publics, between the questions it poses and the solutions that
can be identified in the work of the humanities.

The most recent issue of Dædalus on the state of the field was published in the
winter of 2009, but that was in a very different context from the one we find our-
selves in now, in the summer of 2022, particularly for those who work (or aspire
to work) in academia. As the first essay in the issue (“The State of the Human-
ities circa 2022”) Einzelheiten, the number of undergraduate majors and the number
of academic jobs have fallen sharply in almost every humanities discipline in the
years since. But even as the academic humanities seem particularly beleaguered, A

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growing effort to connect the humanities to the public appears to be gaining rec-
ognition in the field. The public humanities have long had a substantial presence
outside the academy in many public-serving institutions in the history and cul-
ture sectors, as well as the public programs of the National Endowment for the
Humanities and its subsidiary state humanities councils. Until recently, Jedoch,
these activities have received only limited recognition within academic circles. In
A 2017 survey of humanities departments, just 38 percent indicated public human-
ities work would be considered valuable for promotion and tenure, with a mod-
estly higher share in history departments, which started to develop more robust
“public history” programs over the past forty years. While a handful of colleges
and universities have now formalized public humanities centers and programs
on their campuses, they remain the exceptions to the rule. And unlike the digital
humanities, which have an ample number of volumes articulating the shape and
scope of their portion of the field, the public humanities still have only a few–and
relatively recent–edited volumes to mark their emergence. Gleichzeitig, Die
place of the academic humanities in public humanities work is unclear, particu-
larly as organizations committed to diversifying the public humanities think seri-
ously about how expertise can be constituted outside of its traditional home.

T his issue of Dædalus weaves these disparate conversations together, bring-

ing a range of perspectives from across the breadth of the humanities en-
terprise into dialogue. The authors are leading representatives in their as-
pects of the field, within their disciplines, institutional settings, or areas of prac-
tice. The first two essays establish a statistical basis for this conversation. Erste,
Norman Bradburn and Robert B. Townsend survey recent evidence about the
health of the humanities, while potentially raising fresh challenges to the field’s
perceptions about itself. Then Alan Liu and his colleagues on the WhatEvery1Says
project assemble the recent wealth of information they have gathered on media
presentations of the humanities to offer fresh insights into the public’s under-
standing of the field (in “What Everyone Says: Public Perceptions of the Human-
ities in the Media”). Their findings are both rich and surprising, as they discover
the term has a substantial presence in public discourse, but often not where one
would expect it, and rarely in forms that relate to academic discourse.

Shifting from empirical evidence about the current state of the field to discus-
sions about its future, the next three essays pose larger questions about the direc-
tion of the field and where it might be (or perhaps should be) heading. In “The
Public Futures of the Humanities,” Judith Butler challenges perceptions of the
academic humanities, while raising concerns about the field’s enclosure with-
in the “ivory tower.” She calls on academics to reposition their own work with-
in the larger challenges facing society and the world; she fashions a vision of the
field that draws on the world and reports back to it. Sara Guyer, in “Beyond the

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151 (3) Summer 2022Berkowitz, Bradburn & Townsend

Survival of the Global Humanities,” then builds on the perspective offered by Ju-
dith Butler by positioning the challenges into a larger global frame, drawing on a
new world report on the humanities that she is editing. Their perspectives reflect
the view of the academic humanities looking out. Carin Berkowitz and Matthew
Gibson, leaders of state humanities councils in New Jersey and Virginia, turn the
viewpoint around and redescribe the humanities from the position of those who
develop programming for the public every day. In “Reframing the Public Human-
ities: The Tensions, Challenges & Potentials of a More Expansive Endeavor,” they
describe what it means to bring the humanities to audiences outside the academy
and challenge their academic colleagues to recognize both the vitality of the pub-
lic humanities and the role it can play in mediating the relationship between the
public and the academic field.

The next three essays describe efforts to create engaged public humanities pro-
Gramm. George Sánchez and Denise Meringolo describe recent projects by two ac-
ademics who are building those bridges between their work and their commu-
nitäten. In “Opening the Humanities to New Fields & New Voices,” Sánchez de-
scribes his work with students to develop humanities programs that reflect and
speak to communities traditionally neglected in the story of Los Angeles. And
Meringolo and her colleagues follow with “Creating Knowledge with the Public:
Disrupting the Expert/Audience Hierarchy,” which describes a project to capture
the history of recent public traumas in Baltimore in ways that build on a respect-
ful dialogue. Fath Davis Ruffins then offers an institutional perspective focused
on “Grassroots Museums & the Changing Landscape of the Public Humanities,”
examining how museums of a range of sizes took up and then amplified the voices
of those who had been long-neglected in the nation’s story.

The next two essays turn the focus from engagements in and with the public
to recent efforts to create new bridges between the public and the scholars in the
academy. Susan Smulyan describes the establishment of one of the nation’s first
academic programs in the public humanities at Brown University (in “Why Public
Humanities?”), and Edward Balleisen and Rita Chin, in their essay “The Case for
Bringing Experiential Learning into the Humanities,” take up one of the largest
challenges for the field (at least as judged by the frequency with which it appears
in the media): assisting humanities graduates into the workforce. Writing from
the perspectives of the University of Michigan and Duke University, Balleisen and
Chin offer examples of new and innovative programs that develop the skills of hu-
manities students by engaging them in projects with and for the public.

Moving from formal programs intended to build better bridges between the
humanities and the public, the next set of authors explores new and emerging ar-
eas of humanities research that are oriented toward greater public engagement.
The first two essays take up two disciplines that we believe are properly aligned
with the humanities, but whose alignment tends to remain contested by other

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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesIntroduction

specialists in the field. In “Communication & Media Arts: Of the Humanities &
the Future,” Roderick Hart describes the recent emergence of these subjects as
areas of research (and statistically, the fastest growing area of humanistic stud-
ies). Then Jodi Magness and Margaret Mitchell take up “Religious Studies & Die
Imagined Boundaries of the Humanities” and assess the relationship between
their discipline and the other humanities fields in one direction, and the public,
in the other.

The four essays that follow consider the relevance of the humanities to some
of the largest areas of public concern. Kwame Anthony Appiah starts this sec-
tion with “Philosophy, the Humanities & the Life of Freedom,” examining his-
torical and contemporary challenges in philosophical explorations into questions
of equality. Keith Wailoo then takes up the medical humanities in “Patients Are
Humans Too: The Emergence of Medical Humanities,” describing the develop-
ment of an area of study given much wider attention by the recent pandemic. Der
penultimate essay by James Pawelski, “The Positive Humanities: A Focus on Hu-
man Flourishing,” describes another emerging area of research that draws on in-
sights from psychology to elevate a new set of potentials for the humanities. And
the final essay in the volume, “Planetary Humanities: Straddling the Decolonial/
Postcolonial Divide,” by Dipesh Chakrabarty, takes up the human dimensions of
climate change to articulate the urgent need for an environmental humanities.
Each of the essays in this section demonstrates how the field is evolving to address
public needs and counters perceptions of the academic humanities as largely iso-
lated in an ivory tower.

For readers who take the journey from beginning to end in this volume, Wir
hope you will take away a more grounded perspective about what currently ails
the humanities, but also a more positive view of a field evolving to meet the chal-
lenges of the moment.

Über die Autoren

Carin Berkowitz is Executive Director of the New Jersey Council for the Hu-
manities. Previously, she worked for eight years at the Science History Institute,
most recently as Director of the Center for Historical Research. She is the author of
Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (2015) and editor of Science Museums in Transition:
Cultures of Display in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America (with Bernard Lightman,
2017) and has published in such journals as Bulletin of the History of Medicine, British
Journal for the History of Science, and History of Science.

Norman Bradburn, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1994, is the Tiffany
and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow

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151 (3) Summer 2022Berkowitz, Bradburn & Townsend

at NORC at the University of Chicago. He also served as Provost of the University
(1984–1989), Chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences (1973–1979), Und
Associate Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences (1971–1973). He is the author
of Building Better Arts Facilities: Lessons from a U.S. National Study (with Joanna Woron-
kowicz and D. Carroll Joynes, 2015), Thinking about Answers: The Application of Cognitive
Processes to Survey Methodology (with Seymour Sudman and Norbert Schwarz, 2010),
and Polls and Surveys: Understanding What They Tell Us (with Seymour Sudman, 1991).
He is Co-Principal Investigator of the Humanities Indicators.

Robert B. Townsend oversees the Humanities, Arts, and Culture programs, Die
Washington, D.C., office, and the Humanities Indicators at the American Acade-
my of Arts and Sciences. Prior to the Academy, he spent twenty-four years at the
American Historical Association as Director of Research and Deputy Director. He is
the author of History’s Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization, and the Historical Enterprise in
Die Vereinigten Staaten, 1880–1940 (2013) and author or coauthor of more than two hundred
articles on various aspects of history, higher education, and public humanities. Er
is Co-Principal Investigator of the Humanities Indicators.

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Endnoten

1 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Heart of the Matter (Cambridge, Masse.: Amer-
ican Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2013), https://www.amacad.org/publication/
heart-matter.

2 Humanities Indicators, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “Higher Education
Umfragen,” https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education-surveys;
and “The Humanities in American Life: A Survey of the Public’s Attitudes and Engage-
ment,” https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/humanities-american-life-survey
-publics-attitudes-and-engagement.

Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesIntroduction
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