It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every single employer in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a humanities graduate. The humanities graduate was spiteful. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. How do I turn from my degree and live? For students of the humanities, all this happened, more or less.
Any student of the humanities understands the power of stories: How they unite us, how they diffuse past borders, how they free us. For example, the story that I jokingly tell myself and others about my English literature major is that it acts as a way of combating thoughts that I am an interventionist. Unfortunately, not everyone believes that understanding stories is still necessary––or relevant.
The humanities have a long, if not fraught, history. Part of it might be its softness or subjectivity. Unlike science’s hard empiricism, humanities take on critical, historical, and oft-conflicting lenses in their quest for truth. In ancient Greece, there was the concept of paideia, a broad-ranging system of education meant to guide men to becoming good, active citizens. Later on in western Europe during the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church took a decisive role in creating strong programs of liberal education. By the late 12th century, the university was born in Bologna and Paris, where instructors typically emphasized teaching theology––quite literally the interpretation of texts. More recently, some universities have touted Great Books programs and Western Civilization courses with the aim of making students read “our” civilization’s venerated works––though these reading lists skew European and Anglophone and propagate Eurocentrism. Perhaps the greatest modern manifestation of the humanities is the liberal arts college. Though they are more of an American phenomenon, north of the border, small, boutique universities like University of King’s College, Bishop’s University, Mount Allison University, and Acadia University stress a liberal arts curriculum. Carleton University’s Great Books program, Western University’s School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities (SASAH), and McGill’s own Liberal Arts major show that even large research universities can incorporate humanistic content.
What is essential about the humanities is that these fields take a normative approach to answering abstract questions about the good and how we should live, whereas the sciences focus foremost on gathering empirical information. These approaches do not need to be mutually exclusive, however. The rise of the medical humanities and environmental humanities––fields which assess human impacts in medicine and climate change––shows that humanistic approaches to the sciences can have positive concrete effects on practice and knowledge creation. In social sciences, there has been a turn to the affective, where scholars focus on emotions in politics and society, and the rise of qualitative methods like narrative counter-storytelling used to magnify the experiences of marginalized communities. These approaches to humanistic inquiry challenge the “hard,” positivist science turn that has taken over some social sciences.
The interaction between the two different communities of sciences and humanities fascinates Victor Wang, a U2 Arts student studying computer science and English literature.
“I get to find really lovely connections and intersections between these two disciplines, the disciplines of computer science, or the skill of programming, along with the skills of reading and writing within English literature,” Wang said. “It may be different to finish, like the coding project versus finishing an essay. One really nice thing to know, as well, is how similar these students’ work and struggles are as well.”
My journey to studying English literature is decidedly not unique––I love to read and write, I love how politics and art intersect, I want to change the world. But I’ll confess that these clear-cut signs alone still did not stop me from starting my degree in management. As a convert to the humanities, I’m especially grateful to finally study my passions. It was not an easy choice. I still grapple with what literature does, what humanities offers, and what theory means, beyond the academy. We live in a profoundly unequal world. The ability to face the pressure to get a job after choosing a pathway of study typically known for its unemployability reflects my own class privilege. Having had the privilege to study the humanities, I want to be able to do something substantial with them. Studying the humanities only to be a passive agent in the face of injustice is a fundamental contradiction that needs to be addressed, unpacked, and dismantled at all times.
Resisting the cultural pressures to study something more “useful” is something that Thai Judiesch, a U3 Arts student in the English cultural studies stream and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (GSFS), takes seriously. To Judiesch, the humanities open up discourse on our social context and lived experiences.
“Humanities articulate something differently which tries to get at the unanswerable questions of the world,” Judiesch said. “And I think that there was something in that level of mystery that felt more intriguing to me [….] I stand pretty firm. I don’t get really wavered.”
After starting at the individual level—through, usually, closeness with a text—humanities students and scholars have to go out into the world. In the wider community, humanities offer opportunities for collaboration and can encompass making, creating, and doing interdisciplinary work. Michelle Hartman, a professor of Arabic literature at the Institute for Islamic Studies and an acclaimed literary translator, emphasized the rewarding outcomes of interdisciplinary scholarship. Hartman, who has collaborated with education scholar Rosalind Hampton and Black disability studies pioneer Therí Pickens, brought together methods from Black Studies and critical Arab American studies in her most recent book, //Breaking Broken English: Black-Arab Literary Solidarities and the Politics of Language//.
