The Humanities of the Future
In our Zoom for Thought on July 13th, 2021, UCD Discovery director Prof. Patricia Maguire spoke with Anne Fuchs, director of UCD Humanities Institute, about, “The Humanities of the Future”. In case you missed it, here are our Top Takeaway Thoughts and a link to the video.
The Role
There are “three central aspects” to Anne’s role. The first is supporting research in the humanities through organising funding, hosting conferences and workshops and building international partnerships. The second is to increase the impact and visibility of humanities research through public engagement, such as with the (opens in a new window)Plotting the Future series. The third is to support the Institute’s thirty-six resident PhDs and postdocs in their career development by providing an inclusive, diverse and lively research space and environment. “While I'm passionate about all these things, if I had to pick one aspect, it's the interaction with PhDs and postdocs from a broad spectrum of disciplines that makes me really really happy.”
The Humanities of the Future
The humanities of the future will make an indispensable contribution to the big societal challenges that we are facing, including the climate crisis, migration, racism, AI, democratic societies, just societies and health. They will do this by being “deeply interconnected and transversal” with a broad spectrum of disciplines. Researchers in subjects such as music, history, modern languages or English will not only collaborate with other humanities researchers but also with empirical researchers in the social and hard sciences.
“Above all I think that the humanities of the future will be environmental, postcolonial and posthumanist. These three aspects are actually all interlinked.”
Instead of simply celebrating the progress of human civilisation, environmental and cultural historians are critically deconstructing our history of extreme violence and warfare. Researchers in new fields such as environmental humanities, posthumanism or energy humanities are looking at our approach to consumption, the history of exploiting natural resources and non-human life forms “and the disastrous consequences of the pervasive anthropocentrism which has defined the humanities for so long”.
Porous Research Landscape
Methodological nationalism, which has shaped the humanities since the 19th century, is being abandoned. This methodology assumes that the nation is the natural, social and political form of the modern world. It “needs to be replaced” with a more “porous research landscape that engages with transnational issues” such as the history of violence, colonial exploitation and the climate crisis. “I think it's fair to say that the humanities have been reviewing some of their traditional assumptions and premises for quite some time.” Fields like cultural studies, queer and gender studies, postcolonial studies and migration studies are all transversal and “have already exploded traditional subject boundaries”.
Posthumanism
Posthumanism refers to a critical approach to anthropocentrism, which regards humankind as the most important element of existence.
“The argument is that we need to replace this with a planetary consciousness” which looks at the material world in “a completely different way… dethroning the position and purpose of humankind”. It involves “critically examining the disastrous legacies we have created for the next generations to come”. The second aspect of posthumanism is “really engaging with artificial intelligence and robotics”.
Humanities and Technology
Technology studies are an intrinsic part of a lot of humanities research, not just within the digital humanities. The current debate on posthumanism looks at how people have become enmeshed with technology.
“All of these technologies come with huge promises but sometimes this technological optimism is one-sided. So the humanities can look at how we can engage with technology critically, which means that we don't deny its uses but we also discuss its limitations.”
The Humanities and AI
There is no agreed definition of consciousness but artificial intelligence does not yet have consciousness. “I'm not sure that we won't get to a point when this is possible. So at the moment we can still distinguish between humans and computers or robots.”
In the future computer chips may be inserted into the brain to, for example, prevent memory loss.
“I think this is where we need much more debate and where humanities scholars need to make an effort to engage with what's happening in this rapidly evolving field, and vice versa. I think students of computer technologies need to engage with critical debates of what they are doing, and that's something that can come from the humanities.”
COVID-19 and Ageism
During the pandemic Anne was involved in a Wellcome Trust project on framing ageing, in collaboration with medical humanities in TCD. “One of our interdisciplinary workshops was on COVID and we looked at the manner in which the over 65s have been represented in public discourse. We found that the representation of that age cohort was overwhelmingly ageist. They were lumped together, one could say, as one homogenous vulnerable group in need of protection without any agency or differences - deeply offensive to many people over 65 who are very active and make a very very important contribution to society”. The category of vulnerability “is not a medical category [but] influenced by social and cultural frames, and we need to examine these frames critically and ask ourselves, are they appropriate?”
Check out Anne’s latest monograph:
Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture. Cornell University Press, 2019. pp. 322. ISBN: 978-1-5017-3510-3
Published: 15th October 2019, Paperback | £21.99. SAVE 30% • USE CODE 09FLYER
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Biography
Professor Anne Fuchs is Director of the UCD Humanities Institute. She is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and in 2014 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Between 1992-2010 she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and then Professor of Modern German Literature and Culture at University College Dublin where she co-founded the UCD Humanities Institute in 2002. From 2002 – 2007 she was Principal Investigator of the five-year Research Programme “German Memory Contests since 1945”, funded by PRTLI3. In 2005/6 she received an IRCHSS Senior Research Fellowship, which enabled her to carry out research for her fourth monograph Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse. The award of a UCD Senior Fellowship in 2010 helped her to complete her research on After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present. In 2011 she accepted the Chair and Professorship of German at the University of St Andrews before moving to Warwick in January 2012. She was a Fellow of the Max Planck research group Memory and History, University of Constance and guest researcher at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Kolleg, Universität Konstanz in 2014.
Prof. Fuchs' research interests include Memory studies (in particular German politics of memory since 1945); German literature in the 20th and 21st centuries; German-Jewish literature; Modernism; the cultural history of walking; time and temporality in the digital era. She has recently published her book
(opens in a new window)Precarious Times Temporality and History in Modern German Culture which is available from Cornell Press.
Her current research concerns the experience of historical acceleration at the beginning of the 21 century. The inability to determine the speed of social and economic developments through conventional legislation and planning in western democracy was underlined by the events in the wake of the financial crash of 2008. Indeed, the premium placed on speed and the constant drive towards innovation raise the question of how cultural connectedness to places and traditions can be assured under such radically new conditions.