Critical Humanities Spaces Network

The Critical Humanities Spaces Network was founded in 2021 in order to facilitate dialogues between centers, institutes, and sites of humanities intervention more broadly construed around the critical lives that our spaces take on, and to reflect on venues for such cross-disciplinary work as aesthetic and affective spaces in which the potential for remapping the social body is always imminent and indeed often in process. Thus the focus of our conversations always comes back to what happens between people, ideas, and environments within the structures of arts, humanities, and interdisciplinary centers and spaces, and on the transformative potentials they hold as integral spaces always already operable within the social. Inflected by questions of the aesthetic and the political, past discussions have been organized around topics of care, space, repair, and risk.

To receive news and opportunities for this Network, please join the mailing list, and please reach out to Network leader Katharine Wallerstein with questions and concerns.

Current committee members include:

• Network co-chair: Maurits Van Bever Donker, Associate Professor, the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape;
• Network co-chair: Katharine Wallerstein, independent scholar and researcher;
• Rosinka Chaudhuri, Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC);
• Andrés Claro, Consejero, Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios en Filosofía, Artes y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile;
• Patricia Parker, Director of the Institute for Arts and Humanities, UNC Chapel Hill and Ruel W. Tyson Distinguished Professor of Humanities

Recent recordings and activities:

• July 21, 2023—Pedagogies of Repair: A Collective Conversation (CHCI, Youtube playlist)

• June 21, 2023—Repair: Temporalities and Spaces of Undoing (CHCI Annual Meeting 2023, Youtube-English, Youtube-Español)

• April 13, 2023—Repair in 'the After': A Conversation (CHCI, Youtube)

• May 12-13, 2022—"Forming the Humanities: On Care" (Youtube) and "Traversing the Humanities: On Space" (Youtube) (CHCI news item)

EVENTS AND RECORDINGS

2024 (upcoming)

Humanities As Risk
May 30, 2024 - UC Berkeley

In a very real sense, the humanities have always been structured through the concept of a wager, a risk, the potential that what is endeavored may well produce something unexpected. The anti-fascist philosopher, Walter Benjamin, referred to this wager (in his quasi-theological language) as “messianic time”, while warning against the simple sense that this might equal a positive hope. Rather, this arrival, l’avenir, carries with it a radical hope, one whose form of arrival cannot be anticipated and yet requires that we keep watch, that we prepare ourselves to be adequate to what might arrive. In this framing, what does it mean to convene/hold/curate Critical Humanities Spaces? Does it help us to think of the humanities, as such, as a wager? And what might this look like in a time that is defined by precarity, risk, and being at risk?

The future of the human has been the humanities’ abiding concern, and the possibility of producing this, its wager. At the same time, when we do the humanities - when we read, write, produce, translate - this activity itself is in the form of a wager, a risking of the unknown, a risking of the self; a welcoming, perhaps, of the stranger. And then in practical terms, perhaps, humanities centers and Institutes are, themselves, a wager within the higher education landscape, one which University executives no doubt read differently to the people that occupy these spaces.

Our session will seek to abide by and interrogate these questions, asking what it means to hold the critical humanities space as a site of and for, wager/risk.

Speakers

• Chair: Maurits van Bever Donker, Center for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape
• Ato Quayson - Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature, and Chair Professor of English and of African and African American Studies
• Eileen Gillooly - Executive Director, Heyman Center for the Humanities and Society of Fellows; Adjunct Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
• Jack Chen - Professor of Chinese literature and East Asian studies, incoming director of the College's Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures
• And TBA

Re-evaluating Utopia: Spaces of Radical Reimagining
October 2024 - Centre de recherche sur les arts et le langage (CRAL) at EHESS, Paris

Participants TBA.

In this workshop, the need to reactivate the double performance of utopian thought —as critical and interrupting of the inertia of facticity (that is, the state of things), and as propositional of what has not yet taken place—will be interrogated from various perspectives, with an underlying understanding of utopia as a practice and an opening rather than as an end. The workshop will unfold over two days, with the first addressing utopia as a critical practice, and the second as a propositional practice. The workshops will be punctuated at either end by speakers of note addressing these questions in their academic and artistic work, along with visits to arts centers and spaces engaging in the work of world-building through their collectives.

Utopia, as recent debates on the uses of the concept make clear, offers itself as a productive lens through which to explore the creation of critical arts and humanities spaces through aesthetic inquiry and practice. Here utopia is understood as an opening, an invitation, and not an (impossible) end. It seems clear to us that creating—and building anew—spaces for collaboration between, on the one hand, those working through questions of how to live in this world together through creative practices with, on the other, those engaged in it through more academic means is increasingly necessary. This is necessary both for the humanities as a form of institutional practice and inquiry, and for those whose interest is less formal and more practice-oriented. This is about inventing a new language through aesthetics that we might hold in common, if differently.

2023:

Repair in 'the After': A Conversation
April 13, 2023 - in Cape Town and online - Youtube recording

What does it mean to abide by a concept like "repair", especially when this comes to function as a term that allows a different intervention in our time? What comes after repair? Is repair something that is only ever in "the after", in the wake, or perhaps, the "hold" (Sharpe)? What does it mean to do repair from that vantage point, and how might this be a method for coming to terms with the legacies of partition that scar our time? Repair, in this instance, would be a coming after, a pursuit, not an arrival. This conversation will begin to open these questions, and others, in relation to the leading-edge work being done by two scholars in very different and yet resonant locations.

Speakers

• Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Director of the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest, and SARChI Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma
• Patricia Parker, Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the Ruel W. Tyson Distinguished Professor of Humanities, and Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  

Repair: Temporalities and Spaces of Undoing
June 21, 2023 - in Santiago, Chile (Youtube-English, Youtube-Español)

Repair: Temporalities and Spaces of Undoing builds from the assertion that repairing is neither replacing nor recreating, nor is repair reparation. The particularities of the historical commotions of the 21st century and the legacies of those past demand that we privilege the minor and the un-common as there from which any new can emerge. How to nurture spaces that refuse a sense of the common marked by inertia or myopia, that foreground the minor as method without fetishising nor entrenching it as subject position, and that engage with the historical legacies of violence and partition (caste, forced dislocation, the aftermaths of slavery) that persist in the present—these are some of the key challenges of the humanities today. In this framing, how might we think of the work of humanities centers and institutes, and the work holding such spaces, as venues for repair? We invite anyone engaged in the work of directing, administering, facilitating, imagining, and creating humanities spaces to join us in this conversation about nurturing spaces for doing the work of repair and human flourishing; indeed, for doing the work of imagining new futures.

Speakers

• Chair: Katharine Wallerstein, University of California, Davis
• Rosinka Chaudhuri, Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
• Heidi Grunebaum and Maurits van Bever Donker, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape.
• Roberto Celedón Fernández, Chilean human rights lawyer, member of the Chilean Constitutional Convention
• Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin and Chair of the Irish Research Council.
• Patricia Parker, Director of the Institute for Arts and Humanities, UNC Chapel Hill and Ruel W. Tyson Distinguished Professor of Humanities

Pedagogies of Repair: A Collective Conversation
July 21, 2023 - at Oxford (Youtube recording)

Organized in conjunction with The Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH)

https://chcinetwork.org/news/pedagogies-of-repair-a-collective-conversation

What does it mean to work with a concept like ‘repair’? What kinds of intervention, and what kinds of teaching and learning does it enable in this particular moment, and in the particular places in which we work?

What comes with, and what comes after repair; what is the work of repair, in the wake of – and in the enduring presence of – the harm done by the legacies of partition that scar our time?

Can repair usefully be thought of as a pursuit, or a form of practice, rather than as an arrival? If so, how do pedagogies of repair relate to the changing, potentially transformative practices, pedagogies, and places of reading, translation, adaptation, and performance?

This conversation will begin to open these questions, and others, in relation to the leading-edge work being done by scholars and artists in very different and yet resonant locations – this time in Oxford.

Morning

• Patricia Parker (Director of the Institute for Arts and Humanities, UNC Chapel Hill): Introductory remarks
• Thomas Cousins (Anthropology, St. Hughes): On the work of repair
• Katharine Wallerstein (Founding Director of the Critical Humanities Spaces Network) and Maurits van Bever Donker (Associate Professor, the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape): Reflections on the Mémorial des martyrs de la Déportation, Paris
• Rosinka Chaudhuri (Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) and Peter McDonald (Tutorial Fellow in English, St. Hugh’s): Revisiting a monument / a space of repair
• Patricia Daley (Professor of Human Geography of Africa at the University of Oxford).: Black ecological repair

Afternoon

• Wes Williams (Director of TORCH) and Euton Daley (Unlock the Chains): Repair in Oxford
• Andrés Claro (Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Philosophy, Arts, and Humanities, University of Chile) : Tikun: Historical repair as translation
• Tinashe Mushakanvhu (Junior Research Fellow in African and Comparative Literature, St. Anne’s College): Repair in/and the archive
• Euton Daley (Head of theater collective Unlock the Chains) and Amantha Edmead (Founder of Kuumba Nia Arts) performance : Still breathing

2022

Forming the Humanities: On Care
May 12 2022 - online - Youtube recording

If the concept of ‘administration’ refers genealogically to forms of ‘care’ (stewardship, accompaniment, taking care), thus largely exceeding the programming of measurable high research outputs amid the so-called economy of knowledge in the current neoliberal system (a teleological function towards productivity, growth, efficiency, applications), what does ‘care’ mean in and for the formation of the humanities? How does ‘care’ define instances which go from the mood and style which determine the intertwined research, thought and creation involved in the humanist task, passing through the evaluation of its processes and works, up to their political commitment and broad social role? How are these forms of care able to create a communitarian consensus in the humanities different from those of other forms of knowledge, especially those of the natural sciences?

Speakers

• Amanda Anderson - Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities, Brown University
• Jesse Bucher - Founding Director of the Center for Studying Structures of Race, Roanoke College
• Pablo Oyarzun - Philosopher, Essayist, Critic. Director of Center for the Study of Philosophy, Arts, and Humanities, University of Chile, Santiago
• Andrés Claro - Consejero, Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios en Filosofía, Artes y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile; an essayist and university professor

Traversing the Humanities: On Space

May 13, 2022 - online - Youtube recording

If the task of the humanities center involves traversing and articulating several topologies, amid which the material space of its actual work, its symbolic space as an institution, and the interdisciplinary and intercultural space created by integrating and translating from heterogeneous discourses, times and cultures, how do centers clear such spaces for the arrival of the new, make room for the unexpected? More precisely, up to what extent are centers able to establish counter-institutional spaces which allow new possible futures, new inseminations between disciplines and cultures, new commitments to re-symbolize the real? How do or can these disruptive spaces promoted by the centers relate to traditional university faculty and departmental instances with their assigned tasks of preserving and communicating more or less agreed-upon knowledge? How can or must the centers establish a solution of continuity between these innovative spaces and contingency, making an impact in the usual relations and problems in human common life through a socially shared language?