Administration Network Conversations, May 12 & 13, 2022
The Humanities Administration Network is pleased to announce a two-part series of conversations: “Forming the Humanities: On Care” and “Traversing the Humanities: On Space.” We encourage and invite participation in both, but anyone is welcome to join in when they can. Each session will be introduced by brief provocations, followed by group conversation. The sessions are for anyone in any way engaged in the work of administering, facilitating, imagining, and creating spaces for humanities knowledge.
The newly reconfigured Humanities Administration Network, building on the contributions of its predecessors, aims to provide a platform for critical reflection on the work of institutes and centers and the unique roles they play, and have the potential to play, both within and outside the academy. Interrogating and theorizing the material, virtual, and philosophical spaces of the center, along with the aesthetic, affective, and political tasks they assume and perform, the intellectual labor of directing, as well as the relationship between knowledge (research, thought, creation) and the public, are examples of the kinds of themes that we will be addressing.
Forming the Humanities: On Care (online session 1: May 12, 12-1:30pm EST, recording available here on Youtube)
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?
Traversing the Humanities: On Space (online session 2: May 13, 12-1:30pm EST, recording available here on Youtube)
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?