How We’ve Come to Talk About the Humanities

What does it mean to ask why the humanities matter?

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The question can sound almost too familiar. Universities have spent years explaining the humanities in terms of what they produce: critical thinkers, effective communicators, adaptable graduates. But over the course of a four-part series this spring, faculty at Duke approached the question from another direction. They considered what becomes possible when we learn to look more carefully at the world around us—at the stories we inherit, the technologies we build, the landscapes we inhabit and the people whose experiences can disappear from view.

The series, a collaboration between Duke Alumni Lifelong Learning and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, brought faculty together for conversations about technology, environmental change, archives, human rights, history and the ways people understand one another. The subjects varied considerably. The questions underneath them did not.

Taken together, the four sessions offered less a definition of the humanities than an example of what humanistic inquiry can do.

Why Do the Humanities Matter?

The first conversation, with Ranji Khanna, Professor of English and Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and Leo Ching, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Schiff Family Dean of the Arts & Humanities, began with education.

Khanna made the case for an education broad enough to move among different forms of knowledge. Her ideal would not ask students to become experts in every field, but to encounter the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences as different ways of making sense of the world. “They all represent different ways of understanding the world that we live in,” she said.

There is something important in that distinction. The humanities do not necessarily offer a single method for arriving at an answer. They can instead change the question itself. “We reframe the questions as well,” Khanna said. A historical text, an archaeological discovery or a work of art can make an otherwise familiar subject look different, particularly when we allow ourselves to consider how people in another time or place understood their own circumstances.

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Ching brought that idea into the lives of students who may never major in a humanities discipline. He pointed to the number of Duke undergraduates who take courses in the humanities and arts alongside their primary fields of study. What matters, he suggested, is not simply what students eventually do with that education, but whether they remain curious. “Just continue to be curious,” he said.

Even the conversation about libraries returned to that idea. Khanna noted how quickly digital formats can become obsolete, while Ching pointed to something less tangible that can disappear when research happens entirely through a screen: the unexpected discovery. A student looking for one book in a library may encounter another simply because it happens to be sitting nearby. That accident can change the direction of research. It can create the kind of “deep research” that does not begin with knowing exactly what one is looking for.

The value of the humanities, in that sense, may have something to do with leaving room for surprise.

New Media, Old Media

That same question of how we encounter knowledge carried into the second conversation, where Luciana Parisi, Carlos Rojas and John Supko considered the changing relationship between technology, media and culture.

Parisi, a professor of literature at Duke, described technology as “a field of experimentation of ideas, ‘socialities,’ and politics.” The phrase suggests a role for the humanities that goes beyond either celebrating new technology or warning about its dangers. Technology is something people make and inhabit, and therefore something that carries ideas about how people should live together.

Rojas, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, brought that question to the systems through which information reaches us. The internet was once imagined, he noted, as a means of creating greater openness and transparency. It has certainly connected people who might never otherwise have found one another. But those same networks can also encourage people to retreat into groups that already share their assumptions. Meanwhile, control over media infrastructures has become increasingly concentrated. As Rojas put it, “When you control these media infrastructures, that really gives you an ability to control how people think.”

Supko, an associate professor of music, offered a different scale of technological possibility through his work as a composer. Computational tools have given him new ways to approach music and, importantly, more choices as an artist. He described the possibilities as corresponding to his “wildest dreams” for his work.

Put together, their perspectives make technology difficult to categorize as either progress or threat. The same systems that expand creative possibility can concentrate power. The same networks that connect people can isolate them. And the same tools that give artists new ways to create can change the conditions under which culture itself is produced and encountered.

That is where humanistic inquiry has something particular to contribute. It can stay with those contradictions rather than resolving them too quickly.

Environmental Humanities: Culture, Climate, and Community

The third session moved from digital environments to physical ones, but the underlying concern with how we see remained.

Saskia Cornes, Assistant Professor of the Practice at the FHI, Gustavo Furtado, Associate Professor of Romance Studies, and Jarvis McInnis, Associate Professor of English, each approached environmental questions through culture and history.

Cornes considered the distance between the industrial realities of American agriculture and the pastoral image of the farmer that remains so familiar in American culture. Looking at that gap means looking not only at farming itself, but at the stories and assumptions that have shaped how farming is understood.

Furtado described the Amazon as “a problem for seeing.” The phrase gets at one of the difficulties of talking about environmental change: landscapes do not arrive with their histories attached. What appears to be an untouched forest can contain evidence of extensive human settlement and environmental knowledge. Furtado's discussion of Indigenous filmmaking offered another way into the problem. “The biodiversity of the Amazon has a cultural diversity side to it,” he said.

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McInnis approached similar questions through the history of the plantation and Black agricultural knowledge. He described the plantation as both “genocidal and ecocidal,” connecting environmental destruction to the histories of slavery, settler colonialism, monocrop agriculture and extraction that helped shape the modern world.

The point is not simply that the past has answers waiting for the present. It is that our understanding of an environmental problem can change when we recover histories and perspectives that have been overlooked. A forest is not only an ecological system. Agriculture is not only an industry. Land carries memory, labor, culture and political history alongside its physical characteristics.

Reclaiming Narratives: Human Rights, Human Wrongs

The final conversation brought that concern with visibility and interpretation into the realm of human rights.

Wesley Hogan, Research Professor at the FHI, works with oral histories that similarly demonstrated the importance of preserving experiences that might otherwise disappear. She spoke about the role of religion in the Civil Rights Movement and in contemporary abortion-care
debates, noting that “religion can function both as a liberating force and as a mechanism for creating hierarchy.”

Adam Rosenblatt, Professor of the Practice of the International Comparative Studies Program and Director of the Duke Human Rights Center at the FHI, considered another kind of absence through his work with forensic science, mass graves and the dead. Identifying remains might appear to be a problem that science can solve, but Rosenblatt pointed to the limits of that approach. Identity is not reducible to biology. Communities and families can understand belonging through relationships, culture and history, and even an official identification can carry political consequences.

Jocelyn Olcott, a professor of history, added the perspective of care. She described the field's emphasis on “interdependence and interrelationality,” a useful counterpoint to more individualized conceptions of human rights. Her work in Latin America also considers buen vivir, or “living well,” and traditions that understand the earth not simply as a resource for extraction but as something people are responsible for caring for. In this framework, humanistic inquiry can challenge the tendency to equate value with price and instead ask what a society considers important enough to protect.

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By the end of the series, the humanities had become difficult to describe as a single thing. They appeared in a library stack, a digital platform, a farm, a film, a mass grave and an oral history. They offered ways of looking at technologies without separating them from politics, of considering climate without separating it from culture, and of approaching human rights without reducing people to categories.

Perhaps that is why the four conversations worked best as a series. Each one complicated the boundaries of the last. The humanities did not emerge as a discipline with one answer to the world's problems, but as a practice of staying curious when an easy answer is not enough.

For the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, creating opportunities for that kind of inquiry is part of its larger work: bringing scholars, students and communities together around questions that cross-disciplinary boundaries and resist simple solutions.