The Relevance Of The Humanities

THE RELEVANCE OF THE HUMANITIES

One cannot reflect on the relevance of the humanities without considering institutional scenarios which set the terms for discussions about the role of research more broadly. The European science policy debate is one such scenario. From the point of view of European institutions, which distribute public funding for research, the role and relevance of the humanities are contingent upon the centrality of the ‘human factor’. Since it would be difficult to deny that the ‘human factor’ (however reductively demarcated) is fundamental in addressing crises, emergencies, large societal questions, and wicked problems, the humanities can be imagined as relevant everywhere — and nowhere. Their association with the arts, cultural heritage, and the cultural and creative industries provides a quantifiable economic justification. Their proximity to the social sciences, in the assemblage known as the SSH, delivers the indirect benefit of heightened policy impact. Both Horizon 2020 and the new European framework for research and innovation, Horizon Europe, do not deny the relevance of the humanities; rather, they envisage the contribution of research in the humanities as the salt and pepper sprinkled over meals prepared and cooked by others. Put differently, the humanities are deemed relevant across the board, but only in so far as their epistemic culture is capable of adapting to the dominant scientific template of knowledge production.

The kind of knowledge — subtle, interpretative, qualitative, critical — the humanities generate may not sit comfortably within this template, which goes some way towards explaining why humanities disciplines were so underrepresented in large collaborative research projects funded under Horizon 2020.  On the other hand, however, the humanities are clearly adapting to a research environment that prioritises problem-solving habits: they have already expanded their remit, amplified the range of objects and phenomena that fall within their areas of investigation, and taken on increased responsibilities as regards the linkages between research, social practices and public debate. The success of the Environmental Humanities, Digital Humanities, Medical Humanities or indeed Health Humanities is a telling case in point, as is the growing share of humanities researchers in various transdisciplinary projects addressing wicked problems like vaccine hesitancy and climate change. The proliferation of transversal areas of research, typically referred to as ‘studies’, as Braidotti rightly argues, is a clear indication of the vitality, creativity and relevance of the humanities in the contemporary world. Yet, despite this wealth of approaches, which proves the humanities’ potential for innovation and openness towards self-transformation, when it comes to justifying how research contributes to solving the problems of the world, the humanities seem always to come up short vis-à-vis not only the STEM disciplines, but also the social sciences, as the Covid-19 emergency has clearly shown.

The context created by the global pandemic has thrown into relief underlying tensions — one in particular that oscillates between extremes of public relevance and irrelevance. On the one hand, the humanities-driven knowledge which sustains, inspires and keeps alive the cultural and heritage sector has more than proven its worth, as testified by the myriad initiatives undertaken the world over to offer audiences much-needed cultural engagement during lockdown, and to reaffirm the value of solidarity. On the other hand, public debates about what to do, how to understand the pandemic and its social and economic consequences have been largely dominated by scientists, of course, as well as by inputs from the social sciences — even as scholars in the humanities strove to be heard.

The pandemic has brought to the fore one public dimension of the humanities which has more to do with spiritual resilience and much-needed release or comfort, than it does with sharp critique and intense questioning. The ‘everyday humanities’ have played a vital role during lockdown, aided by the interventions of museums, art galleries, heritage institutions which were also facing the dire prospect of non-survival. Should this dimension be discounted on the ground that it is too soft, that it reduces the humanities to a purveyor of therapeutic ‘relief’ to people in distress, that it lacks the critical edge humanists are trained to expect? Another possibility could be to argue that the humanities are relevant as they foster education and research which provide the cultural ecosystem with its most essential nutrients. Shutting down or downsizing humanities departments and research centres is the surest way towards the desertification of culture and its institutions — the Covid-19 crisis has revealed how crucial their role is for the general public. Even if this recognition of the social value of arts and culture may not immediately translate into increased social and symbolic capital for the humanities as academic disciplines, the interface between academic and cultural work has emerged more starkly as a space of relevance for the humanities.

As regards the opposite pole of the tension, namely the subordinate position of the humanities in the pandemic debate, this has much to do with the vexed question of providing evidence-based policy advice. Experts across the sciences have relied on models to predict bio-political outcomes from the processing of data. Data driven research and artificial intelligence may well have taken a front seat in public debates. However, the limited effectiveness of some policies, their differential impact on the lives of individuals and groups, and, most of all, the costs of unpredicted secondary consequences are already emerging. This provides the humanities with one further incentive to rethink and reapply their conceptual instruments and methodologies. The humanities can present concepts, approaches and evidence bases subject to different forms of validation but which are particularly pertinent to how societies engage concretely at a non-statistical level with bio-political management of personal and collective risk. They would include the persistence of interpretation and the validity of the counter-intuitive; the evidential value of ‘anecdote’; the capacity to imagine, historicise and theorise the individual and collective phenomenologies of demographic segmentation; behavioural models of the subject, their interests, processes and solidarities; experiences of vulnerability, confinement and recklessness; the relationships between privacy and liberty; theories of communicative effect; the interface of the past with the future; and, crucially, the understanding of forms of uncertainty within a futurity increasingly subject to genetic, financial and political regimes of calculable probabilistic destinies.

The Board of ECHIC (European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres)

Silvana Colella

Ortwin De Graef,

Alex Hansen

Steven Yearley