“…Given that stigma‐normal categories and the meanings and experiences connected to these categories occur within and are shaped by changing historical and cultural contexts (Dovidio et al ; Hacking ; Hannem and Bruckert, ; Kusow ; Lopes ; Oyserman and Swim, ; Reissman, ), the ongoing public discussion over the decline of the humanities colors the context within which today's humanities majors encounter, resist, and eventually embrace stigma. Many prominent humanists take as a given that traditional fields in the humanities are under attack, in a state of crisis or, less apocalyptically, in decline: In a New York Times op‐ed, Gutting () noted that “‘crisis’ and ‘decline’ are the words of the day in discussions of the humanities.” The American Academy of Arts and Sciences () has described the humanities as “endangered.” Wolin (:9) has even posited that we may be “justified in posing the question: does the contemporary crisis of the humanities portend a situation where we are at risk, quite literally, of losing our souls?” The rhetoric of crisis has, in turn, invited dramatic defenses of the humanities and attendant rhetorical opportunities to enumerate the special contributions of humanist inquiry to both higher education and society, and the ability of humanism to invest life with meaning and “soul” (Franke ; Harpham ; Sitze, Sarat and Wolfson ). The humanities majors we interviewed who were troubled by stigma reproduced this rhetoric; claiming disregard for grades, they tended to report reveling in the humanities' presumed unique access to the liberal arts' romantic notion of self‐liberation, and spoke of their peers in STEM fields as grade‐oriented, market‐driven educational consumers.…”
This article extends symbolic interactionist thought on authenticity and stigma allure into the context of higher education in the United States where the status of the humanities is contested. Our abductive analysis of twenty‐nine, semistructured interviews with undergraduates at an elite university reveals that selecting a humanities major has social costs. Yet the students who opt into these majors renegotiate ideologies, practices, and resources in ways that generate meaningful educational experiences. Navigating these problematic situations in which status is threatened enables the social production and personal aesthetic experience of authenticity. These findings add a new evidentiary basis to theory on stigma allure and, in doing so, demonstrate that when rhetorics of crisis collide with the late modern quest for authenticity voluntary stigma can become a powerful, if also unwieldy, resource.
“…Given that stigma‐normal categories and the meanings and experiences connected to these categories occur within and are shaped by changing historical and cultural contexts (Dovidio et al ; Hacking ; Hannem and Bruckert, ; Kusow ; Lopes ; Oyserman and Swim, ; Reissman, ), the ongoing public discussion over the decline of the humanities colors the context within which today's humanities majors encounter, resist, and eventually embrace stigma. Many prominent humanists take as a given that traditional fields in the humanities are under attack, in a state of crisis or, less apocalyptically, in decline: In a New York Times op‐ed, Gutting () noted that “‘crisis’ and ‘decline’ are the words of the day in discussions of the humanities.” The American Academy of Arts and Sciences () has described the humanities as “endangered.” Wolin (:9) has even posited that we may be “justified in posing the question: does the contemporary crisis of the humanities portend a situation where we are at risk, quite literally, of losing our souls?” The rhetoric of crisis has, in turn, invited dramatic defenses of the humanities and attendant rhetorical opportunities to enumerate the special contributions of humanist inquiry to both higher education and society, and the ability of humanism to invest life with meaning and “soul” (Franke ; Harpham ; Sitze, Sarat and Wolfson ). The humanities majors we interviewed who were troubled by stigma reproduced this rhetoric; claiming disregard for grades, they tended to report reveling in the humanities' presumed unique access to the liberal arts' romantic notion of self‐liberation, and spoke of their peers in STEM fields as grade‐oriented, market‐driven educational consumers.…”
This article extends symbolic interactionist thought on authenticity and stigma allure into the context of higher education in the United States where the status of the humanities is contested. Our abductive analysis of twenty‐nine, semistructured interviews with undergraduates at an elite university reveals that selecting a humanities major has social costs. Yet the students who opt into these majors renegotiate ideologies, practices, and resources in ways that generate meaningful educational experiences. Navigating these problematic situations in which status is threatened enables the social production and personal aesthetic experience of authenticity. These findings add a new evidentiary basis to theory on stigma allure and, in doing so, demonstrate that when rhetorics of crisis collide with the late modern quest for authenticity voluntary stigma can become a powerful, if also unwieldy, resource.
“…Digital or not, processes of knowledge production have always been of central concern to humanities scholarship. Geoffrey Harpham, former President and Director of the National Humanities Center, lays out a rationale for what kind of intellectual effort humanists traditionally engage in, which a host of responders (including Jonathon Culler, Mark Edmundson, Rey Chow, Monika Fludernik, Jerome McGann, Elizabeth Freeman, Susan Stewart, Meghan Morris, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht) accept (with some expansions and modifications): “The scholarly study of documents and artifacts produced by human beings in the past enables us to see the world from different points of view so that we may better understand ourselves” (Harpham, , p. 23). To clarify this statement, Gumbrecht () notes that “Harpham and I would not have much debate about the goals and functions that we set for the humanities,” and yet “we might disagree on some of the ways and attitudes through which we believe these goals can be achieved.… For not only are the goals that we set for the humanities always and perhaps necessarily quite vague.…”
Section: Information Work In the Humanitiesmentioning
The omnipresence and escalating efficiency of digital, networked information systems alongside the resulting deluge of digital corpora, apps, software, and data has coincided with increased concerns in the humanities with new topics and methods of inquiry. In particular, digital humanities (DH), the subfield that has emerged as the site of most of this work, has received growing attention in higher education in recent years. This study seeks to facilitate a better understanding of digital humanities by studying the motivations and practices of digital humanists as information workers in the humanities. To this end, we observe information work through interviews with DH scholars about their work practices and through a survey of DH programs such as graduate degrees, certificates, minors, and training institutes. In this study we focus on how the goals behind methodology (a link between theories and method) surface in everyday DH work practices and in DH curricula in order to investigate if the critiques that have appeared in relation to DH information work are well founded and to suggest alternative narratives about information work in DH that will help advance the impact of the field in the humanities and beyond.
“…An enormous silence is then installed. This is Auster's particular response to the theory of Trauma (Harpham, 2005(Harpham, , 2008Vickroy, 2002), a distortion meant to show the unrootedness of contemporary world. As Jameson observes: "[…] never in any previous civilization have…the fundamental questions of being and of the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless" (Jameson, 1971, p. xviii).…”
Following the theory of Trauma as a critical approach, it is analyzed how Paul Auster' s Timbuktu shows up the maladies of the contemporary world with a parody of disease full of excess and somehow mocking at its own elements. It is a distorted version of infirmity, the way it used to appear in former works of literature. The device is a winkle to the reader to envisage whatever novel or story from a carefully distanced view, very much in the way that Postmodernist authors do but with the realistic use of the form that he regularly employs.
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