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Annual Themes for the Jackman Humanities Institute

The advisory board sets annual themes for the Jackman Humanities Institute.  Each theme will help govern the selection of Fellows, public conferences, seminars, and workshops for the coming year.

2008-2009:  Telling Stories

• Making sense of our world depends on the practice of narrating events.  In both oral and written traditions, and ranging from the historian's monograph to the epic poem, a film, or a single painting, the activity of telling stories serves as a topic for diverse kinds of scholarly inquiry.  Humanities research explores various modes of telling and the social, political and epistemological and ethical implications of how and why stories are told.

2009-2010:  Pressures on the Human

• Today humanists must contend with a fundamental question: Is the object of our scholarship -- humanity -- still a valid category?  This question arises from pressures that challenge the distinctions that make us human beings.  Some of these pressures arise from science, medicine, and technology:  how are we to understand the distinction of being human when our physical activities can be recognized as part of animal biology, when our physical makeup is governed by the biochemistry of DNA, when our mental capacities are interwoven with those of computers and artificial intelligence?  Can progress in medicine and technology replace the various functions that have historically and theoretically made the human distinct?  Using various approaches to study the artistic and scholarly records of the past and present, humanities scholars explore these pressures.

2010-2011:  Image and Spectacle

• Human beings make worlds appear by imagining and "imaging" them; they display worlds to others in performances.  This cross-cultural theme embraces the study not only of how images relate to the reality of the world, but also both as individuals and societies we generate images.  The spectacle of performance, which was the origin of theory in the ancient Greek world, leads to many kinds of reflection, from performativity to epistemology, from theories of history to literary and aesthetic theory, from cultural criticism to paleography.  It extends ultimately to examining the role of reflection (speculation) and criticism of images and their worlds.

2011-2012: Location/Dislocation

• The experience of dislocation prompts insight into how people and ideas inhabit space, and what happens as they move. Many experiences of uprooting and exile are unwelcome; arrivals in new locations often generate violence and intolerance. The arts and books, languages and stories of the old country often remain vital for immigrants, creating diasporic cultures of memory and need; at times the hybridity created in a new place is not a simple amalgam or a peaceful overwriting. Cities are the common site of exile and new creations, and in their architecture and overlapping communities of trade, worship, and education, cities provide an archival record of the disruptive encounters that result from dislocation. The task of humanities research is to engage these complex practices of memory, importation, colonization, and assimilation.

2012-2013: Food

• Food is a basic human need. It shapes desires and yields many kinds of enjoyment. The humanities explore food from diverse perspectives seeing it both as an object produced and consumed and also as the means and symbol of our human relations. The diversity of what we eat (and don’t eat) and of how food is produced and shared shapes cultures, communities, nations, and empires. Refracted through literature, religion, and art, food is a central lens for exploring human history and the patterns of our interaction. Hunger, as an index of poverty and of environmental disaster, provides a reversed lens with which we can explore justice and ethics. How humans get what they eat, from near and far, is basic to ways of inhabiting places on the earth and relating to other species. From hunter-gatherers to communal gardens, feudal farming to agribusiness, food and the systems that provide it are matched by a diversity of the tables at which we eat--food for celebration, sustenance, display, competition, joy and sorrow.

2013-2014:  Translation and the Multiplicity of Languages

• What are the implications of knowing more than one language? From mythic reflections on the Tower of Babel through contemporary philosophical reflections on the question of translation, the multiplicity of languages has been an ongoing focus of inquiry. How is translation possible, both in the specific sense of translating speech or texts, but also in the larger sense of bringing meaning from one system to another, including from speech to writing? How do we conceive of languages of music, as well as song; icons and symbols as well as scripts? How best can we interpret the exchanges between languages in a world of multilingual interactions? In the ancient Near East, for example, a number of written bilingual texts sometimes reflect a local language and lingua franca, other times reflect a political orientation and appeasement or defiance. Translation between cultures and languages produce unintended results, often creating new originals. Amidst these multiple languages, what is the impact of the untranslatable?

2014-2015       Humour, Play, and Games

• A distinctive human quality is our sense of humour, and our attraction to play and to games. Play is central to such fields as literature, music, poetry, art, and film. Humour can, of course, be very serious: a powerful critique, a source of strength to survive, a tool for building solidarity, and a means of drawing and redrawing limits. But humour also poses a challenge to the serious. Today, when scholarship needs to justify itself and time is money, what room is left for play and humour? Can they be justified along functional and economic lines (e.g. play is the seedbed of the genuinely new) or must we resist justification in the name of play itself? What is an old joke worth? Games can be both competitive and collaborative, and play is structured by the virtual spaces games create. Playing games and studying games fosters new modes of knowledge. This theme will allow all disciplines, those that have long-recognized the aesthetic importance of humour and play and those that traditionally have not, to intersect with new thinking about games, and so explore a full range of serious (and sometimes funny) play.

2015-2016       Things that Matter

• Because words are the privileged medium of communication, things have long been characterized as mute. However, a focus on material culture has provided a particularly fruitful field of research in the humanities. Things bear affective, social, cultural, historical, religious, economic, and political meanings and relations. They can be traces of the past, commodities or gifts, symbols of the divine, tools, raw or natural materials, or works of art, furnishings or decorations, or merely be moved out of our way. They provide insights into how people make sense of experience and come together as societies. Whether as relics of ancient cultures or as contemporary commodities, things are at the heart of humanities disciplines. How can we make them talk? What do things tell us about societies and their histories?

2016-2017       Time, Rhythm, and Pace

• The modern experience of time is often characterized by its “increasing speed,” its linearity, and its emphasis on “now.” But time does not have to be regarded as the flight of an arrow, a race track, or a forking path. If we consider the body, the planet, or the longue durée of history, it becomes clear that rhythm, cycle, pace  and temporality pervade the human condition, now as they have always done.  Occurring at multiple scales (neuronal firing, diurnal habits, menses, calendars, life cycles, the rise and fall of civilizations), rhythm is concrete, existential, and profound. How do rhythm and cycle, rather than velocity, characterize human life? What are the politics of chronology? How can a deeper understanding of time, rhythm, and pace -- from literary theorists, historians, phenomenologists, political scientists, and diverse other sectors of the academy -- provide us with guidance in an increasingly frantic and fast-paced world?