Crisis, Change, and the Humanities: Parameters of Discussion

Abstract

Dynamic metacritical, systemic, paradigmatic thinking about our times is a direct outcome of the work of the humanistic disciplines, for they provide us with the language to understand the operative and abusive functioning of power and inequality. The humanities also teach us that we internalize these systemic operations as new contradictory "locations", as new experiences of space and identity, that destabilize and make more difficult our need to feel anchored in our social realities. This prefatory essay outlines a pertinent paradigmatic framing of our neoliberal context and reclaims higher education's key role in the development of democratic traditions of civic engagement. It offers a hopeful regeneration of our times of crisis through the work of the humanities and highlights the long tradition of cultural critique already in place in gender-sensitive disciplines that opt for a reimagining of the future grounded on social change and justice.Keywords: humanities; crisis; neoliberalism; gender; precarity Gender in Times of Crisis: A Multidisciplinary Conversation is a special issue dedicated to feminist methodologies that highlight the productive outcomes of crisis, contradiction, and fracture. Taken together, the essays model a type of "disaggregate thinking" (Davis 2012), whereby things that appear to be separate are thought together; and where natural, common-sense connections are made uncomfortably less so. The essays deal with the struggles of social change in a wide array of areas that range from higher education to welfare activism, from queer gardens of memory to new models of citizenship, from gender violence to the school-to-prison pipeline, from community activism to the brutal effects of neoliberal economic policies on dignity and quality of life. These articles offer an imaginary for change that is multidimensional and based on a tense dialogue between the different axes that mold the strands of experiences that structure our lives; knowledge that crosses and questions facile identity lines, and which unites and disaggregates in a contestatory and transformative fashion. The scholarship reflects this approach by refusing to confine itself within the borders of traditional fields of research or within the formats of the expectations of customary academic writing. The collection is multi-and inter-disciplinary in nature, and unconventional in format. It is an example of how collaboration between scholars, students, artists, and activists in a non-hierarchical fashion produces an increasingly more sensitive field for thinking about the crisis of our times. The writing stems from the research and discussions facilitated by the "Times of Crisis" seminar held at Dartmouth College's Gender Research Institute in the spring of 2014 (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~grid/events/2013_2014/times_of_crisis_2014.html).This introductory article proposes a set of reflections on the notion of crisis, its contemporary origins, and its use as a trope of emergency. Conceived spatially, as a metaphorical roadmap f...