Amanda Anderson panel discussion: Where are the Humanities?

Some of the most influential frameworks for understanding human thought—in psychology, in moral and political philosophy, and in cognitive science—have failed to recognize the quality, form, and significance of slow, persistent ruminative processes oriented toward experiences of moral shock or disturbance. Such experiences include, but are not limited to, profound loss, grief, regret, or injury, including those fundamental assaults on dignity we might designate as status-injury. Drawing on literature, psychology, and philosophy, I demonstrate that rumination is a productive moral process and not merely a psychological symptom of oversensitivity or trauma endured.

Lecture (11.00am-12.30pm) to be followed by a casual lunch (12.30pm-1.30pm).

Free Panel Discussion: Where are the Humanities?

It has become commonplace to observe that what our politically polarised, climatically changed, technologically accelerated world needs now are more humanities. Prescriptions of this kind can be appealing, especially to professional humanists. But they are also confounding, in part because they do not really help us get our bearings. As Amanda Anderson has written recently in her long essay in the volume Humanities Theory, sweeping 'the humanities’ into a generalised category often means losing sight of the distinct disciplinary fields and practices that actually constitute it. Our conversation experiments with a few ways of orienting ourselves. What does and should it mean to locate humanities disciplines within settings that are, for better and for worse, increasingly ‘post-disciplinary’, especially in the age of AI and climate disruptions? How can humanities academics collaborate meaningfully and generatively with scientists? What sort of work have figures of ‘world’ and ‘planet’ been doing in the humanities, and how can the humanities better inform our senses of the worldly and the planetary? Where indeed are the spaces for reflexive thinking in our politically fraught times? 

A Conversation with Professors Amanda Anderson, Julian Murphet and Debjani Ganguly.

Convener and moderator:
Dr Killian Quigley.