HumCore Workshop #3: Great Books and Global Brutalities

Alexander Key:

Okay. Welcome, everybody. Thank you ever so much for coming at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning. I really appreciate it. I think it's great. This is the third workshop in this yearlong series of workshops that we're having at Stanford dealing with issues to the global humanities. I circulated last night the second of the reports that I and colleague [inaudible] has been writing on these workshops. So they're going to build up and that's going to be like a written conversation of what we've been doing over the year.

Alexander Key:

It gives me tremendous pleasure to welcome two colleagues this morning, professors Nasrin Rahimieh and Najeeb Jan. I'll just give like a quick introduction. Nasrin Rahimieh has been the director of the Center for Persian Studies, the chair of Comparative Literature, and now and most excitingly for us, the director of the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine. Her research focuses on intercultural encounters between Iran and the West, modern Persian literature, exile, displacement, post-revolutionary cinema. She has a long list of publications. It's a great honor to have her with us here today in the conversation.

Alexander Key:

Professor, Najeeb Jan, after a BA in Philosophy at Rhodes College, an MA and a PhD at University of Michigan Ann Arbor works on cultural and political geography, historical and political thought focused on militarization, nationalization, terrorism, and the spatial architecture of war and violence in South Asia.

Alexander Key:

And when one does these introductions, one reads the different genres of faculty bio that one finds in different academic contexts of the world and the English one is particularly self-effacing and minimalist. And I would like to read from Najeeb's bio, because I think it's a brilliant, and just with Nauman Naqvi a couple of sessions ago. It's a brilliant articulation of the kind of ideas that we're interested in.

Alexander Key:

Echoing the very archaic roots of the word seminar, his primary goal as a teacher has been to implant a passion for critical thinking and to inculcate an appreciation for the nuances, challenges, and complexities of postcolonial global politics. Given that our collective current ways of governing and inhabiting the world are no longer sustainable, given the ubiquity of violence and justice, suffering and inequality across the globe and in full view of our marked fragility in the age of what many geographers are calling the Anthropocene. His classes are charged with a sense of urgency to forge new paths of thinking in order to confront the multiple crisis of our time.

Alexander Key:

It's great to have you both here. We're going to have 15 minutes each from Professor Rahimieh, and then Professor Jan. And then, they're each going to get a little five-minute slot to respond to each other, and then we're going to open it up for Q&A. Thanks so much, Professor Rahimieh, I will pass it over to you.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Okay. Thank you. I'm going to share my screen so I can show my slides. That's visible alright, everyone? Great. Well, thank you very much for including me in these ongoing discussions. I'm sorry that I missed the December one, but I'm very much invested in staying connected and learning from everyone's experiences.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Let me begin by saying that the humanities core, we call it a program at UCI, actually, is a course. It's not a sustained program that actually gives, leads to a degree. It's a course that shares a lot with the beginnings of UCI humanities. That is it was created, the course was created in 1970. And the idea behind the creation of the course was to introduce students across campus to the humanities, to the disciplines and inter disciplines, across disciplines and study in the humanities.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

The way it has been structured and worked since 1970 is that every three years, the course theme changes. And with that, the director. The way it's done in practical terms is that the dean puts a call out and anyone who teaches in the School of Humanities can propose a theme, and then a panel of associate dean and various other colleagues actually pour over these submissions and proposals and choose one through an interview process.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

That's why you see animals, people in power which of the current theme of the course that I have been directing since 2019. And this is the last year of this particular cycle. My colleague Jonathan Alexander takes over next year and his theme that's very exciting is world building. Now when I proposed this theme of animals, people in power, I couldn't have known the extent to which the questions that I was planning to raise with the students in the course would become so immediate and palpable to us and our students.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

The pandemic, of course, is concentrated what I've envisaged toward the course. That is our relationship to nature, to other species, to non-human animals, and how we think about them, how we use them or see them as food for consumption, where, of course, living a moment that makes us acutely aware of the longstanding ecological consequences of our reliance on and treatment of animals and makes us reexamine the very ways in which we conceptualize knowledge about other species. And then, of course, our relationship to them.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

The course is really composed of… Oops. Sorry. I went too far. Composed of two parts. It's really essentially two courses. The students who take it get eight units of credit for it. And it's got a lecture component and seminar component. The lectures are given weekly. They're two, 50-minute lectures each week by a senate faculty. And the way those lecturing faculty are decided or are chosen is also through a process of calling for proposals.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Once the theme is decided, the director of the course invites colleagues to submit proposals. And so, through those proposals I'm going to choose clusters and how to organize each quarter. It's a yearlong course and each quarter students re-enroll. So they don't necessarily stay with the same instructor. Now these two weekly lectures are complimented with three hours of seminar in small groups of 19.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

We also have honor sections dedicated for campuswide honor students. Their sections are capped at 17. The course itself is attractive to a large number of students, because it satisfies two lower division writing requirements and five general education requirements like multiculturalism, international studies, et cetera, et cetera.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And the other thing that is important is that in the seminars, the instructors, there are about roughly 50 sections of this course in 50 seminar sections. The seminar instructors walk the students through the lectures, unpack lectures, where necessary. Work through the reading assignments, so analyze, pour over them more closely, do group work. And also focus on the writing assignments. So it's a very writing-intensive course. So that's also where the seminars come in.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Now in terms of the reading assignments and the writing assignments, of course, they're all configured to work with the theme and they are determined through a process of consultation with the director. The course also has a writing director to ensure that we manage to conform to the criteria for the lower division writing requirements and the learning outcomes. Then, the same thing applies for the exams. They're done collectively. We share questions. We meet weekly. By we, I mean the lecturing faculty and the seminar instructors. And the exams and the writings really are decided together in that way.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

The lecturing faculty themselves come from different disciplines. And of course, depending on the theme, depending on the proposals received that the different departments, different areas in the school are highlighted. At the moment, we have nine faculty, including myself that come from departments of English, comparative literature, history, Asian American studies, film and media studies, philosophy and religious studies.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

What I neglected to point out that each faculty lectures for three weeks. It comes down to each faculty member delivers six lectures before shifting to another. So as you can imagine, and the difficult part of managing the course is making sure that the clusters we put together for each quarter makes sense. So at the moment, for instance, we have in the fall quarter, we focus on literature, literary analysis, introducing students to close readings, et cetera.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And then, we also move to history, visual studies and film and media studies, philosophy, et cetera. What I wanted to say is that the kinds of questions that we ask students to ponder, I just wanted to give you a quick overview of some of the issues that, and texts and/or visual texts that we use for teaching.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

For instance, how do we define animals? How much of what we know really is based on the natural world? So for instance, in the fall quarter, they start with the medieval beast series. We have lectures on animal fables and we work also through Shakespeare and some Persian text in the fall.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Then, we move to other kinds of questions. For instance, what kind of political work is done when we compare people to non-human animals? And we have faculty who lecture on the dehumanization of groups of people, the marginalized people, their objectification. So they're introduced through various works, be they archival, textual work, for instance, the history of the Andes or performance art as we see in a couple, in the cage, they're invited to think about, analyze these phenomena.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And then, obviously, continuing with the questions that we ask is how human narratives about animals have aided the interrelated forces of oppression, colonization, and ecological destruction and how might we also dismantle those things? I'm sorry that I put a lot of images here to show you some of the kinds of work they study. I meant to also put down at the moment the students are working through, for instance, comics, children's stories, and then moving to surrealism.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

So one of the essays they do, for instance, in the winter quarter is on the study of surrealism. So each faculty in their lecture will talk about their own research as well. This is one of the things that we like to highlight is how is it that a professor of literature goes about doing research? What does it mean to do secondary, to look for secondary sources in literature? When we moved to history, the historian who was lecturing, for instance, on the Andes, talked in great detail about how she developed her own understanding of the ways in which animals have been represented in the archives of the conquest of the Andes.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And she also brings to them secondary sources that they are asked to pour over, with some guidance in the seminars, to determine how do we judge or how does a historian engage the work, the accuracy? How do we arrive at understanding of what is a reliable source and whatnot?

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And finally, I just wanted to give you a sense of some of the testimonials that we have from the students. This, as you'll see by the students name is that, and their designations, is that our students are not just from humanities. So the course, this yearlong course, enrolls about roughly 1,000 students. It is required for… Pardon me, all humanities majors. So we have every year the challenge of ensuring that there are enough spots for the humanities students are saved there, but then any honor student, what we call campuswide honors programs at UCI have had a tradition of always taking humanities core, but because of its reputation in teaching basic skills in research, regardless of the kind of research they do. And also they learn to write multimodally.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And I'll just say one or two words about that. Am I over time, Alexander? I didn't want to-

Alexander Key:

You have two minutes.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

All right. Quick, just about the writing assignments. That the writing assignments are scaffolded and we build gradually on what they learned. For instance, they learned from small passage analysis or they write a short essay. They move to the study of secondary sources, then visual analysis, and then learning about different methods of analysis, the different practitioners in the humanities use.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

We have also added, I think about three or four years ago, we added a website creation project. And the idea was that our students really come from so many different disciplines and they need to be able to write, to address different audiences. We also wanted to give the students something outside the formal essay writing that would enable them to reflect on their own progress through the course. So we have actually asked them to start. We give them just very basic tools using Google sites to create websites.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And they have prompts for what to address in the websites, but over the course of the year, they can revise the website and keep track of their own learning. So it becomes a reflexive way for them to explore their issues they had at the beginning of the course, what were some of the challenges and how they overcame them? And it's lovely that we see year after year some students maintain those websites long after they leave core, because they see that as a moment in which their own thinking about the university, their studies congeal.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Now, we love the fact that students, regardless of the discipline they come from, pick up skills and forms of knowledge that are transferable. So whether they're in biological science, physical sciences, or criminology, law, and society. Okay. I'll stop with that. Thank you.

Alexander Key:

Thank you. Thank you, Nasrin. That's wonderful. And Najeeb, I will pass it over to you. It's all yours. Nasrin, if you could stop sharing?

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Absolutely. Thank you.

Alexander Key:

Najeeb.

Najeeb Jan:

Thank you so much. I just wanted to start by thanking you obviously for this generous invitation to be part of this conversation. I must confess however that after agreeing to come and be part of this conversation, I was left wondering about why I actually agreed, because I don't really feel that I have any deep expertise or scholarship on the question of the global humanities, having only joined the humanities program in COVID times in the last couple of years.

Najeeb Jan:

I had been teaching political geography, human geography for a decade previous. And that is, of course, a very interdisciplinary subject and it's not taught widely, as you know Stanford doesn't have one. I was trained at Michigan. We didn't have a Geography Department there. So it was this kind of no man's land as a discipline, but it really opened up the kind of space for the kinds of work that I was interested in doing. But at this particular point, I feel that surrounded by so many visionaries and genuine luminaries of the field in humanities, I feel that I may not have really much to offer that isn't really either already obvious to you or something that has already been critiqued and written about.

Najeeb Jan:

So I really only have a series of personal confessions and anxieties to share. That was the first one of those. I do have some experience, however, of teaching across continents. So teaching in Karachi and teaching in Boulder in the United States. And hopefully, I can get a, maybe a sense of what the differences are and what the challenges are of teaching similar kinds of topics.

Najeeb Jan:

Now, I teach a course, I teach part of the core humanities curriculum that Dr. [inaudible] and Haris have already discussed here so I won't sort of go over the details of the vision of the program. Needless to say, I was very drawn to it. And that's why I kind of thought that I could make a contribution.

Najeeb Jan:

So one of the classes I do teach outside of the core classes is this class that I had been teaching at CU for many, many years as well. It was called "What is Power?" And I've had to structure it slightly differently, because obviously Pakistan and Karachi in that region is a space that is saturated by precisely the forms of power that I talk about, including imperial power, in addition to sort of more theoretical conceptions of power and for current marks. But I situate my classes really within what I think are the very real and unprecedented crises of the time in which we experience and that we are all living in.

Najeeb Jan:

And so, we talk about species extinction, the increasing rise of fascism, obviously, four years of Trump has really driven that point home about the widespread prevalence of racism, poverty, injustice, the Anthropocene, economic injustice, poverty, genocide, colonialism, all of the pleasant virtues that have defined the age in which we live or the age of world target to use a phrase from Rey Chow.

Najeeb Jan:

And then, this particular year I had them watch the film "Don't Look Up" as a kind of preface to the class. And it's a really tough thing to do increasingly, in part, because when I started teaching sort of classes about climate catastrophe and imperialism, various other kinds of the sort of rising tides of fascism, especially political and religious nationalism in South Asia, which is sort of really what I'm interested in.

Najeeb Jan:

It used to be really hard to do that, to sort of garner kind of a real concerted interest, with exception of always, there are always a few students who were really wonderful, but sort of the broader class kind of took it as something that I had to get credit for or fitted their slots. But in an atmosphere where the imperative to ski outweighed the imperative to think and meditate on the crisis of the human condition, it was a really tough sell, but over the years, as…

Najeeb Jan:

I mean I'm talking about, so when I started teaching maybe 15 years ago, but over time after 2001, the war on terror and in the Trump era, it's becoming, I don't feel anymore that I'm some kind of a Cassandra or Chicken Little crying that "the sky's falling down." I mean we really are confronted with some massive, overwhelming situations that we face, and course it's all been heightened by the pandemic.

Najeeb Jan:

And of course, for students in Karachi, this is a little bit much more… I mean the whole sort of, the framework that I put, that I set the class in is to emphasize the nature of the crisis, and then link crisis with critique, crisis with the question of judgment and the notion of humanity being on trial, in general. But in Karachi, of course, it's easier to do because that's a space that has also been subject to the distortions and perversions created by the rift of the American imperial logics to which most American students are not really existentially familiar with them and they... We kind of live in the eye of the storm, so to speak, but of course that storm is now coming home.

Najeeb Jan:

In a very quick way, let me just quickly share one screen that I don't know if you can see this. Is this visible?

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Yes.

Najeeb Jan:

I mean I love sort of, I mean referring to sort of popular, to popular films and popular culture. I think, initially, obviously before turning to Foucault or Agamben or Plato. I mean these draw students in much more powerfully and much more quickly when you sort of can address things that they've been watching and thinking about it. But I take this passage from Scranton's work, and it kind of sort of wraps up what we're facing.

Najeeb Jan:

I won't read the whole thing, but he talks about how, of course, what we're facing is a philosophical challenge, right? And understanding that modern civilization is already dead. And of course, the overwhelming evidence that we now have about climate catastrophe and the impending doom really now creates this atmosphere of students' collective sense of being at home in the world is now kind of routinely punctured by moments of tremendous unease and [inaudible].

Najeeb Jan:

And I like to begin with this, not because I'm perverse and I want to make life more difficult for my students, but because I think there's a kind of a Heideggerian strategy in highlighting the sort of situation of [inaudible] anxiety that we face. And it allows me to preface, I mean because the challenge we face collectively is so overwhelming and so daunting, it allows me to insert what I think are… Sorry. Just pass that other stuff that I'm doing, is to sort of then introduce these sort of much more broader, perhaps I'm not sure if bringing in Agamben is always very useful, but I mean they get a sense that we're facing a large problem and that we need to address it with kind of large radical ideas.

Najeeb Jan:

And I do that through the introduction of the notion of the state and the space of the exception, but preface it with Heidegger's understanding of what ontology is, which is not simply a philosophical quest for, first principles or it's not simply sort of an investigation into sort of the intellectual history of how people thought about the question of being, but it resonates very quickly.

Najeeb Jan:

And there's this wonderful and enigmatic phrase from the contribution where he says the abandonment of being must be experienced as the basic event of our history. And this becomes, I'm just going to stop sharing for a second. So as I said, there's a kind of a Heideggerian strategy in all of this and... Beg your pardon, I kind of lost my… I lost my notes. Technological issues here. I may have to just continue differently, anyway.

Najeeb Jan:

So as I said there's a kind of perverse Heideggerian strategy in that for Heidegger anxiety and dread are part of the two sort of fundamental modes of care. And it is through anxiety or the experience of anxiety that something is disclosed. And obviously for Heidegger, it's something ontological. So the experience of angst is not just a breakdown of kind of familiarity, but a breakdown that reveals something about the age in which we live, and that's kind of the hook into a much more complicated and sometimes abstract discussion about being. But I framed the class, I tell them the story, I think most of us are probably familiar with this myth in some form that it's about the sort of the origins of evil.

Najeeb Jan:

So I refer to them, I talk about the chronic story in which God is sort of creating the human species, and then commands the angels to bow down, which is a bit weird because the word bow down is only used for God, but God is asking man to bow down to, the angels to bow down to God. Of course, Satan, at least refuses this request and says, "I'm not going to bow down to a man. You're the only entity that's worthy of worship. And so how dare you ask me to…" And of course, then that's how he becomes the fallen angel. Within Sufi lore, of course, this is sort of rewritten and rethought as Satan really is the kind of, as a lover of God, but his wager, his trial, his wager was that human beings were precipitated crisis, and that they will sow discord on Earth and they will be reckless and there'll be injustice and it's not a worthy entity.

Najeeb Jan:

And so, after going through all of this, we talk about the Anthropocene, we read Scranton and various other texts. I posed a question to them. I said, "Who's winning the argument, God or Satan?" And again, it's a kind of way to intensify the political, economic, climate sense of crisis, and then add a layer of kind of the theological crisis on top of that.

Najeeb Jan:

And sometimes just throwing in things like that famous clip from Kafka when he talks about there's hope, plenty of hope just not for us and that… So I know this sounds all a bit kind of almost cruel, but one of the other things that then I do offer this class is I ask them to define… We talk about ethos and spirit and I'm trying to define the spirit of the class with them and the kind of investigation we're doing, but we all recognize that these investigations, what they're reading, what they're thinking about doesn't occur in some kind of abstract vacuum — that they're part of a larger space in which kind of…

Najeeb Jan:

There's a rhythm and a kind of capitalist effect within which they are producing their work of thinking. And I ask them, "How would you define your relationship not to this day or this moment but to your age, your time, your sense of the future?" And increasingly, and I ask this in all my classes, and now increasingly the uniformity, the answer is anxiety, uncertainty, depression.

Najeeb Jan:

And sometimes I feel that my recourse to these theorists, whoever the… They vary, Agamben, Foucault, whoever, really is a mask for another layer of anxiety. And that is the intense pressure. I mean because the students are looking at you. I mean they're overwhelmed, not only by the fact that they have to be in the university and produce grades and they're subject to the rhythms of this GPA machine, which produces its own set of anxieties, which produces the kind of space that is really contrary to the ethos of humanities education. But nonetheless, that's the space that we work in, but over time when I would first ask these questions, I would get a range of answers, but increasingly now it's just this drum beat of this is anxiety.

Najeeb Jan:

So I mean the idea, of course, at some point is that you really have to be at the bottom in order to see possible modes of redemption or ways out of the situation. But the anxiety that comes with… I mean I don't know if other people feel this, but it seemed like in the humanities as opposed to other disciplines there's a greater sense in which there's a burden of responsibility, because you're dealing sort of much more concretely with the question of the human condition.

Najeeb Jan:

As an economist or an anthropologist, you can sort of have your own kind of sphere, but the humanities seems that it should be the repository of some kind of wisdom that answers the question. What does it mean to be human? And it's a question, of course, that that demands an answer now in a more intensified way than ever before.

Najeeb Jan:

And I often feel like I don't have an answer. And so, as I'm seeing them, their faces and their responses, they're looking at you thinking that, "Well, he has answers." Because obviously our politicians don't, maybe our academics do. But I don't. I mean I can maybe help them diagnose the crisis in more interesting and fanciful ways, but I don't really have a solution. So there's this intense sense of the entire project being a failure. So I mean that's the kind of second anxiety and confession that I have to offer.

Najeeb Jan:

The other point that I wanted to make, I don't know if I have…. Do I have time?

Alexander Key:

Maybe let's go back to Nasrin, and then you get your second little chunk for that to continue. I mean that's so much-

Najeeb Jan:

I do just want to very quickly sort of end with sort of the thought that comes to my mind is that can the humanities really, are we really talking about a global humanities or I'm talking about a global brutalities? I mean which would be sort of a more realistic name for what we're really teaching and trying to elucidate, but the question that I would want to leave other people with, no doubt it's been asked before is similar to Adorno's question about, "Can there be poetry after Auschwitz?" Can we afford the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene? I mean does it have to be something else? Because quite clearly this nomenclature has been a disaster. So yeah. I'll leave it there. There are a couple of other things maybe we can talk about but…

Alexander Key:

Thank you. Thank you. Yes. So Nasrin, and then we'll go back to Najeeb, and then we'll open it up.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Thank you, Najeeb. We really appreciated your focus on the question of what does it mean to be human and how do we handle this very difficult topic in this day and age? In my experience, which is of course limited to this period of teaching in humanities core, which has coincided with the pandemic has been very much about anxiety and the students registering in ways that perhaps were not as palpable to that before.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And I think we started seeing some of these reactions around the George Floyd killing, because we focus so much on the question of power, similar to the kinds of questions you ask, very cogently. That created the possibility for us to open it up for the discussion with the students. And the way we do this is we have hours reserved for a Friday forum to whether we have a speaker or we have engaged directly with the students. But we also found that these young people, these are first-year students and they are coming from various backgrounds, a large portion of our students, I should say, are from the underserved minority groups and many of them are first-gen students.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

So we learned very quickly, particularly because of the pandemic that the economic disparities were such that some of them had to sit in a… They were in a family home, but they had no privacy. So they were using a bathroom to sit through class on a Zoom session with us.

Nasrin Rahimie:

And so, the kinds of crises that they have been witnessing in some ways actually forced us the instructors to be much more upfront about the very things, Najeeb, that you so beautifully put is we don't have the answers. And I really think that is… I've come to the conclusion along with the instructors and the other faculty who lecture is that the best thing we can do is just to show that the failures, as you pointed out, and that it is really nothing if maybe there was a time when the humanities core course at UCI could focus on the great achievements and classics and whatnot. This isn't the moment.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And I think that just what is great for the way we can every three years change the theme is also to focus on topics that are really at the center or forefront of everybody's mind. But your questions and the crisis and critique, I think I'm going to steal these from you and take them back to our next staff meeting, because we've been really talking about these issues about how do we face these students and what is our ethical responsibility to the students that we sent them out to the world, and how do we represent the humanities? That's a wonderful question. Yeah. Sorry.

Alexander Key:

Najeeb?

Najeeb Jan:

Would you like me to respond to Nasrin's comments here or her general talk or both simultaneously?

Alexander Key:

Oh, either, whatever you fancy.

Najeeb Jan:

Yeah. Well, I'm sorry. This sort of, I kind of laid it on quick and thick and sometimes I always feel that, again, maybe this is just overreaching, but over the course of teaching now and as political and economic and other conditions are changing before us, I mean it's… And certainly, there's now a universal consensus that we can't teach business with sort of this notion that of business as usual. We can't just simply think about students having ordinary careers.

Najeeb Jan:

We also have to teach to the fact that there may not be a world in which that there can be careers and that's increasingly be… Again, one often feels that, okay, well, this is far in the future and we'll have a technological solution to all of the problems at some point. But I'm not holding my breath, but I certainly see that what you're doing in that core class, it sounds… It's really imperative that students get an introduction to some of these ideas, especially questions about the animal.

Najeeb Jan:

In fact, I talk a little bit about, in my class about, in fact, animals really do teach us and show us… I mean in thinking about animality, it really opens up some of the questions about the perverse nature of human society. And in particular, I use the example of techno chicken farming, for example, right? And of course, in the case of techno chicken farming the way in which their ample descriptions of the way in which they're treated, the way in which they're subject to certain kinds of medical regimes, confinement in various kinds of spaces.

Najeeb Jan:

It's a very cruel business, right? And all of it is with the aim of reducing the animal to its, denuding it completely of its dignity and any being beyond its kind of usefulness within an economic system. Right? So this idea that we set upon nature and animals simply as resources and raw materials I think is a very important one. And for me, it also highlights what I think is sort of at the core of many of these forms of power relationships, which is…

Najeeb Jan:

I mean this is coming from both Foucault and Agamben who diagnose our contemporary constellation as intensifying forms of the apparatus. There's obviously this notion that it is not the palace, but the camp that defines our modernity and whether this is hyperbolic or laconic depending on your view of Agamben, I guess, entirely. But I mean for me, the challenge then becomes is that can we… We really have to probe these questions and we may be wrong in the trajectory and these figures that I'm thinking. We may be completely barking up the wrong tree, but we really need radical, much more brave. We have to sort of…

Najeeb Jan:

I mean for me to teach all of this requires a tremendous amount of vulnerability, because I'm not trained as a philosopher. I was trained as a historian as my colleague Parna Sengupta. Just a quick hello to Parna. It has been a long time since I've seen her. But we weren't trained for this kind of world and this kind of teaching, but I feel that the responsibility on us, especially in the humanities is just sort of amplified given the significant nature of the crisis.

Najeeb Jan:

And so, I'm wondering how other people deal with that, whether they are or not? I guess those would be some of the questions that I would raise but…

Alexander Key:

Brilliant. Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you both very so much. Okay. So now, yeah. I'd like to open it up for questions if anybody… Oh, yeah. Dan. So just kind of wave on the screen or put the hand up or however and I will keep an eye. Dan.

Dan Edelstein:

All right. I have a very boring and practical question and a slightly, hopefully not controversial, but more existential point to make as well. Excuse me. So my more practical question is for Nasrin, and I'm wondering, how do you manage the relation between lectures and seminars? Because so often that seems to be the tricky thing, right?

Dan Edelstein:

The faculty member comes in, gives us sort of brilliant, detailed, but often very like specific lecture, particularly when it's dealing with their own research. That might go, some of it might go like way over the student's head. Then, they get into the section and how do you sort of figure out that connection so that they're actually talking about the lecture? So that's the practical question.

Dan Edelstein:

The more sort of existential question is I was reminded listening to Najeeb about William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech where he writes, "This is 1950. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit, right? The humanities are no longer useful." Then, he goes off to say, "There's only one question, when will I be blown up?" Right?

Dan Edelstein:

So this is written obviously in the moment of the nuclear age, fears of complete annihilation. And if you sort of think about it more broadly too, it seems like the humanities have almost always been produced at moments of profound existential crisis. Plato, all of Plato, we forget this, but it's written after the greatest crisis of the Athenian Empire ever. They're living not only in the aftermath of the 30 tyrants, but also the incredibly devastating Peloponnesian War.

Dan Edelstein:

Think of Seneca. We read Seneca today like the source of consolation and it's so easy to forget that he's just a couple years away from being sentenced to cut his own veins and die by Nero. The essays, also these sort of serene texts that we turn to in moments of our own feelings of confusion are written at a moment where everyone's running around proclaiming the end of the world, because of the wars of religion. So I just feel like in a way there is a little bit, I sense of parochialism in our claims to living in this sort of uniquely challenging moment.

Dan Edelstein:

Now, of course, like what we're doing to the world has never been done before. There's reasons to be utterly terrified about the future. At the same time, was it worse as a sort of as an existential experience to be like Boethius living at the moment when the entire civilized world had collapsed and he had been imprisoned by some barbaric Gothic king. And maybe Boethius actually gives us help of like what should we be doing? Maybe the whole point of the humanities isn't to try to solve the political problems, which we're actually really poorly equipped to do, but to provide the sort of consolations of philosophy that are precisely what make being a human worthwhile and meaningful, not to say that the political isn't important, but that's really not what they're coming to our classes for.

Dan Edelstein:

They want to make changes, probably studying Agamben isn't going to be the most effective way. That figuring out how to organize politically, it just seems like we've become such a place of displacement. And I'm just always reminded like Terry Eagleton's comment about Fredric Jameson. That it's not by writing a Marxist critique of Madame Bovary that we're going to destroy capitalism. Right?

Dan Edelstein:

And it just feels like maybe we're not doing really what the students need us to be giving them right now when they're facing so much anxiety, and that we have to accept that there's a lot of the biggest problems of the world are probably not going to be solved by literature and humanities professors right now. But that I'm just throwing that out there. I don't mean to be controversial. I just feel like there's a way in which we actually do have something to give our students, which can really help them, and maybe give them the energy and the peace of mind they need to go out and do the other important stuff, but not in our classes.

Alexander Key:

Controversial is good. Nasrin, Najeeb?

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Yes. If I can address that very pragmatic question, which is a really key one. I agree with you. Is that one of the lessons over the years we've learned in humanities core is that, I'm saying we, not that I was here, but that we need to tell the lecturing faculty how to do it.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

In fact, we don't just give them a carte blanche to go and talk about [inaudible]. You're addressing animals, people and power and how are you going to use the readings you have assigned to deliver a thesis-driven argument? Because what we want every lecturing faculty to model as much as possible is: How do we arrive at an argument? How do we use evidence?

Nasrin Rahimieh:

So the material that they have assigned that students are supposed to be reading are used in the lectures, and then each lecturer will also provide their slides. So that instructors in class can go, "Okay. So what was the disconnect for you when this particular component of the argument didn't seem to work?" And the beauty of that is that our most confident lecturers, of course, talk about how I want you in the seminars to challenge my argument.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

So what they can focus a little bit of time on in the seminars is, "I didn't agree with that, and why didn't I?" "Why didn't you agree with it? So how would you frame your argument?" That's not to say that it always works smoothly. Some of our instructors are just glorious in doing this, others, including yours truly, sometimes get carried away, start talking about contemporary Iran and while I'm trying to address literature. If I could just address briefly, quite address the other question that "what are our students looking for and are we, what is our job?"

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Is that I find that, I get a lot of the sense of, "Oh, are we doing something right or what is it that the students need?" It's always really interesting for me to listen to the students who are not in the humanities who say, "I didn't know any of this actually existed." So by the time they get in the spring quarter, Najeeb, you were talking about the Anthropocene and so on. They have a way in which they've… They often say they've developed a vocabulary, a set of kind of framing, ways of framing questions themselves.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And that really, I agree with you that I think that we need to give them ways that they could go into the world, do the work that they do. I'll give one example. And then, I'll let Najeeb address is that we have a lot of… We are a Hispanic-serving institution and we've had always had a lot of Hispanic students, but one of the interesting things that many of our first gen students from this particular population pointed out to us is that, "Oh, I didn't realize that Spanish could be the language of research. I thought it was just something my parents spoke."

Nasrin Rahimieh:

So there was suddenly this kind of like explosion for them of, "Wow, knowledge." So when my colleague, Rachel O'Toole, who has just finished lecturing on the Andes and colonization of the Andes and the waves of colonization. It's just this great moment for them to discover that they can use Spanish and their own heritage, their own background, which sometimes they're embarrassed about suddenly becomes a way of addressing broader questions.

Najeeb Jan:

Yeah. Thanks, Dan, for that question. I'm certainly under no illusion that anything that I'm going to be doing in my classes is actually going to address any of the problems concretely. I just feel that somehow I feel that there should be a sense in which the diagnosis is accurate.

Najeeb Jan:

I mean if you walk into a doctor's office and he can't really tell you what's making you sick, then the doctor is a bit useless. So I do see to some extent that our responsibility and task is to diagnose sickness. And yes, of course, there's been poverty and there's been crime and terrible things going on since the beginning of time. I find that that kind of approach is sort of on the one hand, well, yes, stuff has always been happening and it's going to continue happening. It's kind of not really saying much at the end of the day, but I do feel there's something distinctive about our moment that Seneca and certainly even the Frankfurt School or even somebody who wanted to commit suicide before being captured by the Nazis again.

Najeeb Jan:

I mean there's something qualitatively different in terms of scale and intensity that no other generation has faced, which is the conceivable proposition that there would be no more life on Earth, right? People could still think about subsequent generations, other… I mean the Anthropocene, the idea of species extinction, including our own, is something that this generation… Now you might say, "Well, it's not going to happen." And that's of course one way to say that tidal waves and…

Najeeb Jan:

I mean living in Colorado, I had to evacuate this house as a result of global warming just a few weeks ago with the fires. I mean it's a very concrete reminder that you're not, everyone is… The precarity is very real. Climate catastrophe is extraordinarily significant. And for students to sort of ... are witnessing the kind of increasing forms of political and religious nationalism, rising tides of fascism, especially in the USA.

Najeeb Jan:

It doesn't really matter to them that these were problems faced by previous generations. They still want to know how to concretely address them. And I feel that we, at least, my own task and my own forms of thinking should in some ways, yes. I mean to some extent philosophy has always just been a way to prepare how to die. And obviously, a lot of the stuff we teach our skills to cope with both… I mean understanding the crisis itself is a way of dealing with the crisis and a way of kind of maybe preparing oneself for the challenge of addressing it in whichever ways one can through whichever career path one has.

Najeeb Jan:

But I do think there's something more significant about our time and that it's not just history repeating itself. There's something about history potentially coming to an end and not in the Fukuyama sense, but in a much more concrete space.

Dan Edelstein:

So let me just clarify one thing. I mean, obviously, I live in California so we're also well aware of climate change. But my point is sort of under, like denied it's important, although I still question like we have lots of classes on climate change and on how to address the policy issues, the scientific issues, those are taught by mostly people and ... future school sustainability, people who really understand what exactly needs to happen at either at a policy level or a science level.

Dan Edelstein:

And I guess that's why it gets back to my point, like the humanities, we have typically been precisely about facing existential crisis. And sure, there's a way in which every crisis is unique, although I would say that the threat of atomic annihilation was similar in this respect, in many respects worse, because I think that the threat to the human species from climate change is probably less than the threat through mutually assured destruction through atomic warfare.

Dan Edelstein:

And so, I guess it just feels like appreciating that in many respects, these conditions have shaped humanistic thought for centuries that sort of makes it maybe feel more pressing to go back to some of these earlier thinkers and say, "Well, what did they have to say about this? How do you steel yourself and how do you live with this state, rather…" And then, obviously, with the intent of trying to do something about it, but you also have to live with it.

Najeeb Jan:

Fair enough. Yeah.

Alexander Key:

Thank you. Yeah. I would just kind of jump on that before [inaudible] question. Not to split the difference, because I agree with Najeeb. But to say that I wanted to pick up on something Nasrin said, which was kind of the thinking pedagogically about who the students are? And I wondered if maybe there's this sense in which… Yeah. If I'm teaching Comparative Literature majors in the complex senior seminar, I think Dan's criticism of the role of academia is really kind of pertinent.

Alexander Key:

Like in a sense that we can't sit there as a group of CompLit majors and look ourselves in the mirror and have a conversation about how CompLit is going to save the world. And then, there are people in the discipline we want to do, but it's a real problem. That's not… The role of literary research, there's a mismatch there, which I think Dan has like perfectly identified. But then when we think of what Nasrin was saying about…

Alexander Key:

And the same is true to often in HumCore, if your students are in STEM and this is maybe the only class they take outside STEM, which is not a criticism. They're getting [inaudible] and they're on the right path. Then, maybe this sort of grow global brutality, as opposed to global humanities is more of a productive discussion with the students. If this is their one class, maybe it works better for the…

Alexander Key:

And I guess I wanted to ask Najeeb what it's like at Habib with the strong, like what's that question like with the strong CS interest and engineering interest among students. Do you find that they're more receptive to ideas about, to the idea, to the angst, to the discussion of angst and anxiety or do you find it's a little cadre of humanities-interested students who are more engaged when you have these conversations with them.

Najeeb Jan:

Yeah. I've been, unfortunately, online for the most part, and the students, they are fabulous. The ones that I've had experiences with, but, and mostly the humanities students they are women. And I think, and the other thing is that unlike the United States, which is brimming with Humanities Departments and universities, Habib is a kind of a unique experiment in Pakistan.

Najeeb Jan:

And that was kind of the third or second point that I wanted to sort of talk about is that… I mean what does it mean to talk about, for instance, humanities in Kabul right now? Right? So in a space like Pakistan, I think there's… The will to a kind of pragmatic, economic, market-driven certainty about one's future is very, very strong amongst the engineering, computer science students.

Najeeb Jan:

So they often come to these classes, many of them, because they have to. There are a few students who sort of are really interested and genuinely are curious about the world and are perturbed and think that they can get answers here and there from different disciplines. I mean, obviously, humanities is a conglomeration of history, political theory, insights into religion, insights into the troubles and the kind of quagmires of existing.

Najeeb Jan:

And the thing is in a place like Pakistan has been shaped and forged in ways that produce a particular kind of… I'm trying to sort of find the right words, but as a result of sort of imperial logic as a result of the way in which… So you have humanities institutes in the United States, which produce citizens who then go into the military industrial complex, foreign policy, the corporate world, and collectively that the United States has a very significant effect on the ways in which precarity unfolds in the rest of the world.

Najeeb Jan (01:02:26):

In fact, we've been directly responsible for creating conditions of precarity, a lack democratic spaces. And those kinds of spaces of precarity, economic deprivation, of course, Kabul, Afghanistan would be a perfect example. The space that's created there for learning and for university environment has been so shaped and marred by conglomeration of U.S. Politics, local Pakistani ISI politics, Saudi politics, to create this space.

Najeeb Jan:

And then, at the same time sort of what sense does it make to talk about a global humanities when there is one space for all of its rhetoric and interesting kind of self-criticism and self-reflexivity is nonetheless still responsible for creating a space where that kind of thinking just seems obscene, right? So there are a lot of people who think that philosophy and all of this stuff is just an absolute luxury for people with lots of money or we need to provide an income.

Najeeb Jan:

And of course, some of those dynamics are at play globally and in the United States as well, but those spaces are just much more intense. And so, a lot of students they sort of, their response to the humanities is, "What is this? What humanity? What democracy? What are you talking about?"

Najeeb Jan:

So it's a hard sell in some ways that this kind of commitment to a liberal core. And a lot of the students actually do resent it. I mean I know there was a computer science student when I asked him like, "So how do you feel about all of this criticisms of nationalism of the very sort of ideological and theological foundations of the country?" And he was like, "It's irrelevant to me. I wish I didn't have to take it. I've got a computer science exam. I need to get a job. I need this and stuff."

Najeeb Jan:

What I sort of was trying to get across to him and said, is that, "Yes. That's all very well and, I mean that's well and good, but there might not… I mean you're going to have to leave this space, because a computer scientist isn't going to be able to solve and address the crisis of the political in Pakistan. You need thinking, meditation from artists, from an array of disciplines and activities and institutions and that paying attention to how the world works and trying to understand the nature of the political in which you are thrown in is that some level vital to our collective visions of ways out of this morass."

Najeeb Jan:

So it's a tough sell for we would constantly have to say that, "Oh, if you take the humanities, you'll be smart and you'll get a good job." I tell my students up front that my class is probably one of the most useless classes that you'll ever take. So if you don't have to take it, don't.

Najeeb Jan:

I mean you don't have to take it, because you can be an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or a great writer without taking this class. So it's not directly going to get in the way of your career, but obviously that's a bit of ruse. I do think that there's some use in trying to sort of ask the question, "Well, what is use to begin with? What are our values?"

Najeeb Jan:

And I guess my point of departure to sort of add to the conversation with Dan is that I've been teaching for 30 years and I'm just sort of talking about my own sense of change in student levels of anxiety and their sense of how they're going to deal with the world has just become, and especially in places like Pakistan, Karachi, where conditions are far more precarious for all kinds of reasons. The question becomes much more acute and they're genuinely worried about, not just their own personal futures, but a collective future.

Najeeb Jan:

And so, my own sense is that we have to, that it can't just be business as usual. I mean this is just not, there has to be some kind of transformation and change. And I don't know really whether the humanities is the place for that necessarily, but it's the question that I'm asking.

Alexander Key:

Vered and then [inaudible].

Vered Shemtov:

First of all, thank you for this really, really interesting and inspiring discussion and description of what you're doing. I've learned a lot. And I want to actually continue with a point that Dan brought up, because I do feel that… I mean there is, we want to teach them how to make arguments and research and how to do research. This is extremely important and we want them to be aware to where the world is going. This is also extremely important and to think, and to have tools to think about these things, but I think that literature comes in when we want them to understand the stories that we are telling about what is happening.

Vered Shemtov:

And the awareness to what extent it is our choice to see or not, to tell the stories in a certain way, whether dystopia or utopia or [inaudible] or anything else, and to critique our stories and to understand the power of what happens, and to understand how tired people get sometimes with their dystopia. And then, we get all kind of utopic kind of stories, narratives that could be dangerous or not.

Vered Shemtov:

And I'm just thinking about coming from Israel and the stories of Benjamin Netanyahu on the Iranian scare, whether it's right or not, this became the thing that everybody was so worried about and children grew up with and just being able, and then it didn't, it was not working anymore. And the story changed to something else, although the scare might be the same or not. Right?

Vered Shemtov:

So just awareness to that seemed to be very important, looking at how we tell narratives and what kind of myths and demons come back from the narratives with footing now, for example. So all of these things seem to me like our role in the humanities, more than solving and more than creating awareness to where the world is going is being able to analyze that, and then think about the stories that ... in my perception of the world is so different than that of the 17- or 18-year-olds that come into the undergrad classes of the first year.

Vered Shemtov:

They were born, for example, into social media. They were born into a world with Facebook and Instagram and all of that and they don't see the world as changing in terms of human connection in the way that I do. And so, all of these discussions and anxieties that some generations that are creating the stories in the universities are expressing are not necessarily there. So I think we also have to spend a lot of time understanding better how, what are their narratives and not just kind of come up with a narrative?

Vered Shemtov:

And this is not criticism to anybody. It's just what seems to me to be one of the important things of teaching. How do we tell stories and why, and when, and where?

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Can I say something? I really appreciate that remark, because it is true that I, for one, like have been teaching for decades and feel that there are disconnects between me and the 17, 18-year-olds that I'm facing in the lecture hall or in the small seminars. So it is really important to hear those stories, but I'm also, I'm just going to give an example of how I have found the stories that we tell and different generations how they can make connections is that by virtue of the fact that we're inside of California, we have a lot of Iranian Americans here who've been raised with a certain mythology of Iran before the Revolution.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And so, when I teach, in a previous cycle that was on war, I taught about the Iran-Iraq war. I used literature and cinema and I found really interesting disengagements. Some students, Iranian Americans ,who would say, "That's not true. That's not what happened in Iran." So it would create a way for me to say, "Look, that's the story that you have heard. Now I want you to actually explore that for yourself. Could you go do what you want to do about this?"

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And so, they sometimes, not always, would come back and say, "I went and talked to my parents about this, and there's something weird there that they're not willing to let go of." So for them to be here, to be able to hear, even if it is only in passing, that there are different narratives about what led to their evolution, what life was like before and after is a connection to their immediate sense of being. Some of them have gone from…

Nasrin Rahimieh:

I found when I first moved to UCI that Iranians here referred to themselves as Persians. And that was a ruse, a way of covering for, I don't want to be part of the Islamic Republic. So bringing that shame to the surface and talking about, why can't you talk about contemporary Iran? What is it about Islam that you abhor? These are real, I found really gratifying working with students on these kinds of issues, not that I've necessarily changed their world view, but that there's the space in which the humanities enable us to do that. Thanks very much.

Alexander Key:

Chiara.

Chiara Giovanni:

Hi. Yes. And please someone jump in if I cut out, because my internet has been kind of off and on today. So yeah. I'm really enjoying the discussion right now. I'm really enjoying the kind of like the comments and the sort of the responses to those. And I was just wanted to ask a question kind of going back to the previous strand of conversation, which is about how our discussions about what the humanities are for might be different in different contexts and in different places, and kind of what we can do about that. Because in listening to this conversation about whether the humanities really are to like save the world or not, and like why and how and where, and when, is thinking of kind of just like the way that some of these discussions have been framed kind of as Najeeb has been saying.

Chiara Giovanni:

I was thinking about the recent kind of back and forth between Dan's colleague and friend [inaudible] who is kind of an expert on the core curriculum over at Columbia and recently wrote a book about kind of the great books courses. And then, some of the criticism that he's received from different writers, and then the pushback.

Chiara Giovanni:

And then, I was also thinking about the stories around the classicist at Princeton, [inaudible], who has kind of been talking about like classics as like an inherently white supremacist exercise. And I was just kind of like thinking about what we're doing here in this particular workshop and how it's different from a workshop that I used to run a couple of years ago that was pretty similar called the humanities education focal group, which was also about how do we teach the humanities? What are they for? But without the sort of like global transnational focus that we have here.

Chiara Giovanni:

And I'm kind of wondering, like I was thinking about those two different narratives, debates, and these writers, and these academics, and how, like, still, we are very much like within a U.S. framing in both of those things. It's like really, really important to talk about great books in core curricular, and it's still in that particular debate very much within the U.S. framing, and with the kind of the conversation about like classics, even though we're talking about antiquities from Rome and from Greece.

Chiara Giovanni:

It's still like the study of it is still very much within a European and U.S. frame. And I'm kind of wondering how we square the fact that conversations about what the humanities are for are going to look very different at Stanford versus at Habib. And that's kind of what we're trying to do here in a way, but nonetheless we are still hosting this discussion here at Stanford.

Chiara Giovanni:

And so, inherently that kind of framing is going to produce something. And how do you have discussions about what the humanities are for and kind of come to terms with the fact that it's going, the answer is going to look very different and there's not going to be a single universal answer like better save the world, better to teach people more about themselves, whatever it is without still marginalizing some of those answers, because when you have different answers and some of them are produced within a very hegemonic or very dominant or very powerful frames, and you have answers that are kind of coming from different places, maybe in the global south, like it's those answers that are not going to be heard as much in the big op-eds and in the big articles about what the humanities are for. It's going to be the answers that we might like produce here at Stanford, for example.

Chiara Giovanni:

So apart from what we're trying to do here, actually engaging dialogue, which Alexander has done really well in kind of putting all this stuff together in which the speakers here and the audience here are doing really well, and like actually engaging in these conversations with colleagues that we might not otherwise have met. Apart from tuning in to Facebook live streams between scholars at Habib University and reading books that come out from different places in the world. How else might we be able to do that, to kind of be okay with the sort of like multiplicity of strands in this discussion about the purpose of the humanities without giving one or the other kind of more power or more weight over another?

Chiara Giovanni:

Yeah. I don't know. That's like a question that I have as the person who writes up the reports from these events and has been thinking about how these events have been going in the context of bigger discussions about the purpose of the humanities today, and this is the very last thing, because I understand why we need to have like one answer, because we need to defend and protect the humanities, whether it's at a rich university like Stanford or someone else, we're still constantly forced to say like, "Oh, well, the humanities are important, because X, we're forced to have a very specific answer to protect our enrollments, to protect our majors, to advertise our courses to people." And so, I understand that pressure, but I'm wondering how we can work out this kind of like uncomfortable diversity of discussion and answers to these questions?

Nasrin Rahimieh:

May I jump in just briefly? I love that question and comment because I live that daily knowing that scholars in Iran cannot erase some of these questions. So for me, which it doesn't address your question completely, but I daily, sometimes weekly, I wish we could really go to books, to articles, to discussions by some of my Iranian colleagues who have been jailed for saying some of these things, who can't question.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And why is it that for instance in graduate student applications, even for a compared literature from Iran, certain kind of things get valorized as opposed to others, because social sciences, humanities are under the microscope and constantly, constantly repressed and et cetera. So one of the ways in which I stay sane for my own sake is to have, I mean we're talking about technology to now be able to connect with colleagues in Iran when they feel safe to have discussions about. And sometimes it comes under the guise of, "Look, I'm going to start teaching, of course, in comparative literature, could we have a discussion? Could we go over some of the stuff that you teach?"

Nasrin Rahimieh:

And I always say to them, "Well, what about the history of comparative literature at Tehran University? Do you want to start with that?" And they feel, "Ooh, yeah, maybe I'm better off teaching what's happening in the West?" But this positionality and how we shift the discussion so that it's not always about us in this location is really important.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

I don't have a good answer to give. I think that we are always, I'm always struck by how quickly we include these on my colleagues, will go to Western philosophy rather than pointing to sources that we could use. Right?

Alexander Key:

Najeeb, anything to add or were this-

Najeeb Jan:

Does somebody else want to ask the question before or-

Alexander Key:

Yeah. There's a question from [inaudible].

Radhika Khoul:

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. This has been a really sort of really interesting conversation. So I teach right now in the college program, which is part of the Stanford Introductory Studies Program. So one of the things that I was thinking about, and this is connected to the earlier part of the discussion we were having is this whole question of like, what are we doing in these humanities classes?

Radhika Khoul:

And there are all these expectations that somehow these global sort of existential problems are supposed to be handled and addressed in these humanities classes, right? And that somehow we are looked upon as these experts who can give questions to these sort of humanistic existential problems. So sort of taking a step back, I was wondering whether we should think more of our humanities spaces as spaces in which we raise questions more than necessarily try to give solutions, right?

Radhika Khoul:

So in my sort of, in my personal career as a student of the humanities, and my PhD is in competitive literature is that I find that there is so much value in questioning some of the basic assumptions that students come to class with, especially if they are like C majors or like basically STEM majors, right? So there are certain assumptions about computer engineering or electrical engineering or software, whatever they are.

Radhika Khoul:

They have certain assumptions that they bring to class and those form their value frameworks. And these obviously impact the products or the designs that they come up with. Right? I mean which kind of rule the world such as Facebook, such as Instagram, and this is why Facebook ends up generating havoc in countries in the global south. And this is kind of connected to what Chiara was talking about earlier, because then knowledge production, and knowledge sort of, the kind of epistemologies that the world functions within is produced in these global north countries and in spaces like Stanford.

Radhika Khoul:

And these are students fundamentally from STEM fields, right? And this is why nobody can really hold Facebook accountable for the genocides, which occurred in countries like Sri Lanka and Myanmar. So sort of coming back to our spaces and what we do as humanities instructors is I feel that we should at least create an environment in which we trigger these questions within the students' sort of thinking.

Radhika Khoul:

That doesn't mean that we have to actually provide a solution. So I think as humanities scholars, we have that responsibility, because I do think that it is only in our spaces that these questions can be asked and can be engaged with in productive ways. So for me, I think that's a value in the humanities sort of core curriculum that we sort of offer and that perhaps is a way to think about our role as humanities instructors.

Alexander Key:

Thanks. Yeah. So we have five minutes left, so yeah. Closing words from Nasrin and Najeeb.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Just quickly-

Najeeb Jan:

Yeah. Go ahead, Nasrin.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Oh I'm sorry. Just quickly too in response to you like [inaudible]. That I think that it is really what you said is very important. That we create the space in which those questions can be asked. I'm reminded of one computer science student from last year who came to my office and said, "I think I can design the perfect app for you for writing the, for sending us the writing prompts."

Nasrin Rahimieh:

I was really quite amused. But in a way, I really enjoyed talking to him, because it felt like, I think what I learned in core is making me think about how to design this thing. Now whether that comes to reality or not, but your point made me think of this young man's remarks. Thank you.

Najeeb Jan:

Yeah. Thank you again, Alexander, for providing this opportunity to be part of these discussions. I mean there are some really excellent questions. Obviously, there's no quick answer. I think quite clearly there is not going to be a single response to what is the task of the humanities, because the very framing of what constitutes the humanities is up for debate even within the academy itself.

Najeeb Jan:

And certainly, but I do think that at some level, the element of power relationships and differences in the way in which various spaces constitute different kinds of potentialities and possibilities varies remark dramatically across the globe and different spaces and determines what can and cannot be asked. What kinds of questions can be engaged in? What kinds of things can be talked about? What kind of narratives and counter-narratives can be offered?

Najeeb Jan:

The Habib curriculum, the Habib core, one of the classes in modernity in South Asia is fundamentally about asking difficult questions and having them look at different kinds of narratives from what they've inherited as common sense or sort of nationalist wisdom. But I do think that there are common questions about power and how power functions in each society that can be sort of addressed at a collective level.

Najeeb Jan:

I mean, obviously, we're subject to it in different ways and it'll play out in different ways. But I think there is that common question of, what does power look like as a fundamental question in the humanities? Certainly, for thinkers like Foucault and others, power, and even broader questions, may idea ask or may suggest that, asking questions about what it, rethinking what it means to be human in this particular time are also really critical and I think important for us to engage in, and I'm certainly not talking about solutions to global problems, I don't think that will ever be the case, but yeah. So I probably will just leave it at that.

Alexander Key:

Thank you. Thank you. This is really, it's been an absolute privilege to take part in this discussion this morning. Thank you all ever so much. There's more workshops and the ones you can't make it to are being recorded and there's writing about them. So, yeah. I'm excited to keep the conversation going. Thank you all ever so much. See you soon.

Najeeb Jan:

Thank you very much.

Nasrin Rahimieh:

Thank you. Thank you for organizing this. Thank you.

Najeeb Jan:

Bye-bye.

Speaker 8:

Thank you.