Download or read book The Humanities and Public Life written by Peter Brooks and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there an ethics of reading, and is this something that the interpretive humanities can and should to contribute to other professional fields, including law, and to public life?
Download or read book The Humanities and Public Life written by Peter Brooks and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tests the proposition that the humanities can, and at their best do, represent a commitment to ethical reading. And that this commitment, and the training and discipline of close reading that underlie it, represent something that the humanities need to bring to other fields: to professional training and to public life. What leverage does reading, of the attentive sort practiced in the interpretive humanities, give you on life? Does such reading represent or produce an ethics? The question was posed for many in the humanities by the “Torture Memos” released by the Justice Department a few years ago, presenting arguments that justified the use of torture by the U.S. government with the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts. No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: This is not possible. Teaching the humanities appears to many to be an increasingly disempowered profession—and status—within American culture. Yet training in the ability to read critically the messages with which society, politics, and culture bombard us may be more necessary than ever in a world in which the manipulation of minds and hearts is more and more what running the world is all about. This volume brings together a group of distinguished scholars and intellectuals to debate the public role and importance of the humanities. Their exchange suggests that Shelley was not wrong to insist that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind: Cultural change carries everything in its wake. The attentive interpretive reading practiced in the humanities ought to be an export commodity to other fields and to take its place in the public sphere.
Download or read book Engaging the Age of Jane Austen written by Bridget Draxler and published by Humanities and Public Life. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanities scholars, in general, often have a difficult time explaining to others why their work matters, and eighteenth-century literary scholars are certainly no exception. To help remedy this problem, literary scholars Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt offer this collection of essays to defend the field's relevance and demonstrate its ability to help us better understand current events, from the proliferation of media to ongoing social justice battles. The result is a book that offers a range of approaches to engaging with undergraduates, non-professionals, and broader publics into an appreciation of eighteenth-century literature. Essays draw on innovative projects ranging from a Jane Austen reading group held at the public library to students working with an archive to digitize an overlooked writer's novel. Reminding us that the eighteenth century was an exhilarating age of lively political culture--marked by the rise of libraries and museums, the explosion of the press, and other platforms for public intellectual debates--Draxler and Spratt provide a book that will not only be useful to eighteenth-century scholars, but can also serve as a model for other periods as well. This book will appeal to librarians, archivists, museum directors, scholars, and others interested in digital humanities in the public life. Contributors: Gabriela Almendarez, Jessica Bybee, Nora Chatchoomsai, Gillian Dow, Bridget Draxler, Joan Gillespie, Larisa Good, Elizabeth K. Goodhue, Susan Celia Greenfield, Liz Grumbach, Kellen Hinrichsen, Ellen Jarosz, Hannah Jorgenson, John C. Keller, Naz Keynejad, Stephen Kutay, Chuck Lewis, Nicole Linton, Devoney Looser, Whitney Mannies, Ai Miller, Tiffany Ouellette, Carol Parrish, Paul Schuytema, David Spadafora, Danielle Spratt, Anne McKee Stapleton, Jessica Stewart, Colleen Tripp, Susan Twomey, Nikki JD White, Amy Weldon
Download or read book Contested City written by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For forty years, as New York’s Lower East Side went from disinvested to gentrified, residents lived with a wound at the heart of the neighborhood, a wasteland of vacant lots known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). Most of the buildings on the fourteen-square-block area were condemned in 1967, displacing thousands of low-income people of color with the promise that they would soon return to new housing—housing that never came. Over decades, efforts to keep out affordable housing sparked deep-rooted enmity and stalled development, making SPURA a dramatic study of failed urban renewal, as well as a microcosm epitomizing the greatest challenges faced by American cities since World War II. Artist and urban scholar Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani was invited to enter this tense community to support a new approach to planning, which she accepted using collaboration, community organizing, public history, and public art. Having engaged her students at The New School in a multi-year collaboration with community activists, the exhibitions and guided tours of her Layered SPURA project provided crucial new opportunities for dialogue about the past, present, and future of the neighborhood. Simultaneously revealing the incredible stories of community and activism at SPURA, and shedding light on the importance of collaborative creative public projects, Contested City bridges art, design, community activism, and urban history. This is a book for artists, planners, scholars, teachers, cultural institutions, and all those who seek to collaborate in new ways with communities.
Download or read book The Value of the Humanities written by Helen Small and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-03 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Value of the Humanities prize-winning critic Helen Small assesses the value of the Humanities, eloquently examining five historical arguments in defence of the Humanities.
Download or read book Value and the Humanities written by Zoe Hope Bulaitis and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-06-19 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the shift from liberal to neoliberal education from the nineteenth century to the present day, this open access book provides a rich and previously underdeveloped narrative of value in higher education in England. Value and the Humanities draws upon historical, financial, and critical debates concerning educational and cultural policy. Rather than writing a singular defence of the humanities against economic rationalism, Zoe Hope Bulaitis constructs a nuanced map of the intersections of value in the humanities, encompassing an exploration of policy engagement, scientific discourses, fictional representation, and the humanities in public life. The book articulates a kaleidoscopic range of humanities practices which demonstrate that although recent policy encourages higher education to be entirely motivated by outcomes, fiscal targets, and the acquisition of employability skills, the humanities continue to inspire and aspire beyond these limits. This book is a historically-grounded and theoretically-informed analysis of the value of the humanities within the context of the market.
Download or read book Call My Name Clemson written by Rhondda Robinson Thomas and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1890 and 1915, a predominately African American state convict crew built Clemson University on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation in upstate South Carolina. Calhoun’s plantation house still sits in the middle of campus. From the establishment of the plantation in 1825 through the integration of Clemson in 1963, African Americans have played a pivotal role in sustaining the land and the university. Yet their stories and contributions are largely omitted from Clemson’s public history. This book traces “Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History,” a Clemson English professor’s public history project that helped convince the university to reexamine and reconceptualize the institution’s complete and complex story from the origins of its land as Cherokee territory to its transformation into an increasingly diverse higher-education institution in the twenty-first century. Threading together scenes of communal history and conversation, student protests, white supremacist terrorism, and personal and institutional reckoning with Clemson’s past, this story helps us better understand the inextricable link between the history and legacies of slavery and the development of higher education institutions in America.
Download or read book Not for Profit written by Martha C. Nussbaum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. In a new preface, Nussbaum explores the current state of humanistic education globally and shows why the crisis of the humanities has far from abated. Translated into over twenty languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.
Download or read book The Humanities and Everyday Life written by Michael Harry Levenson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We think of the humanities as a cluster of specialized academic activities. So they are. But they also belong to the ordinary world, the world where students and faculty make connections and careers; where they eat and drink and fret; where they move through new buildings and old seminar rooms. In The Humanities and Everyday Life, Michael Levenson places the academic humanities within this field of daily life, where abstract thought stands alongside routine needs. The humanities also live outside the university in activities that have been overlooked or undervalued: in book clubs, in historical re-enactments, in visits to museums and libraries, in private collections, in contributions to Wikipedia, and in amateur genealogy. These activities belong to the humanities, quite as much as research published in specialty journals. Probing distinctions between professionals and amateurs and asking what constitutes expertise, The Humanities and Everyday Life addresses both the university and the world beyond, to see where they meet and fail to meet, and to argue that the walls between them should lower. -- from back cover.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Human Happiness written by Benjamin Radcliff and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Data, methods and theories of contemporary social science can be applied to resolve how political outcomes in democratic societies determine the quality of life that citizens experience. Radcliff seeks to provide an objective answer to the debate between left and right over what public policies best contribute to people leading positive and rewarding lives. Radcliff offers an empirical answer, relying on the same canons of reason and evidence required of any other issue amenable to study through social-scientific means. The analysis focuses on the consequences of three specific political issues: the welfare state and the general size of government, labor organization, and state efforts to protect workers and consumers through economic regulation. The results indicate that in each instance, the program of the Left best contributes to citizens leading more satisfying lives and, critically, that the benefits of greater happiness accrue to everyone in society, rich and poor alike.
Download or read book You Have to Pay for the Public Life written by Charles W. Moore and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-02-27 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previously uncollected essays of an architect whose love of people, buildings, and nature was reflected in the places he built. Architect Charles Moore (1925-1993) was not only celebrated for his designs; he was also an admired writer and teacher. Though he wrote clearly and passionately about places, he was perhaps unique in avoiding the tone and stance of the personal manifesto. Through his buildings, books, and travels, Moore consistently sought insights into the questions that always underlie architecture and design: What does it mean to make a place, and how do we inhabit those places? How do we continue to build upon but respect the landscape? How do we reconcile democracy and private land ownership? What is original? What is taste? What is the relationship between past and present? How do we involve inhabitants in making places? Finally, what is public life? As the world becomes smaller, and the uniqueness of places and landscapes gives way to sameness, Moore's celebration of the vernacular and of the surprising are more relevant than ever.The pieces in this book span the years 1952 to 1993 and engage a myriad of topics and movements, such as contextualism, community participation, collaboration, environmentally sensitive design, and historic preservation. The essays in this book reflect as well Moore's scholarship, humanism, urbanity, and great wit.
Download or read book The Penelope Project written by Anne Basting and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-05-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arts of Penelope: Art-Making and Making Artifacts, by Ellie Rose and Shannon Scrofano -- Who Is a Hero in Your Own Life?, by Jolene Hansen -- Mamie's Story, by Beth Meyer-Arnold -- On Playing the Suitors: In Dialogue, by Daniel Cohen and Rusty Tym -- On Playing Penelope: In Dialogue, by Joyce Heinrich and Nikki Zaleski -- Five Seconds after the Audience Left, by Anne Basting -- The Magic of the Movement, by Anne Basting and Leonard Cruz -- Finding an Ending, by Maureen Towey -- Excerpt from Finding Penelope, Scene 5, by Anne Basting -- Part Five: Evaluation and Evolution -- Beyond Penelope at Luther Manor, by Ellie Rose -- On the Challenges of Continuity in Civic Arts Projects: In Dialogue, by Michael Rohd and Anne Basting -- Making Structural Changes in the Curriculum through Penelope, by Robin Mello and Anne Basting -- What Did the Research Tell Us?, by Robin Mello and Julie Voigts -- The Essential Elements of Penelope, by Robin Mello and Julie Voigts -- The Landscape beyond Penelope, by Anne Basting, Ellie Rose, and Maureen Towey -- Appendices -- Appendix 1. Penelope Project Timeline -- Appendix 2. Penelope Project Team -- Appendix 3. Partnership Agreement -- Appendix 4. Prompts for Penelope Activities and Challenges -- Appendix 5. Storytelling and Playwriting Syllabus -- Appendix 6. A Note on the Program Evaluation, by Robin Mello -- Appendix 7. Funding Partners -- Appendix 8. Survey Questions -- Contributors -- Index
Download or read book What Are We Doing Here written by Marilynne Robinson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays on theological, political, and contemporary themes, by the Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as “deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still.”
Download or read book The Future Without a Past written by John Paul Russo and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Argues that technological imperatives like rationalization, universalism, monism, and autonomy have transformed the humanities and altered the relation between humans and nature. Examines technology and its impact on education, historical memory, and technological and literary values in criticism and theory, concluding with an analysis of the fiction of Don DeLillo"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Ethics of Reading written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by New York : Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1987-01 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines texts in which novelists read themselves, discusses the influence of reading on the reader, and explores the relationship between literature and society
Download or read book Rescuing Socrates written by Roosevelt Montas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.
Download or read book See You in the Streets written by Ruth Sergel and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2016-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2017 American Book Award Winner from the Before Columbus Foundation In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City took the lives of 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women and girls. Their deaths galvanized a movement for social and economic justice then, but today’s laborers continue to battle dire working conditions. How can we bring the lessons of the Triangle fire back into practice today? For artist Ruth Sergel, the answer was to fuse art, activism, and collective memory to create a large-scale public commemoration that invites broad participation and incites civic engagement. See You in the Streets showcases her work. It all began modestly in 2004 with Chalk, an invitation to all New Yorkers to remember the 146 victims of the fire by inscribing their names and ages in chalk in front of their former homes. This project inspired Sergel to found the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a broad alliance of artists and activists, universities and unions—more than 250 partners nationwide—to mark the 2011 centennial of the infamous blaze. Putting the coalition together and figuring what to do and how to do it were not easy. This book provides a lively account of the unexpected partnerships, false steps, joyous collective actions, and sustainability of such large public works. Much more than an object lesson from the past, See You in the Streets offers an exuberant perspective on building a social art practice and doing public history through argument and agitation, creativity and celebration with an engaged public.
