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The Public Value of the Humanities (The WISH List) by Jonathan Bate
Recession is a time for asking fundamental questions about value. At a time when governments are being forced to make swinging savings in public expenditure, why should they continue to invest public money funding research into ancient Greek tragedy, literary value, philosophical conundrums or the aesthetics of design? Does such research deliver "value for money" and "public benefit"? Such questions have become especially pertinent in the UK in recent years, in the context of the drive by government to instrumentalize research across the disciplines and the prominence of discussions about "economic impact" and "knowledge transfer".In this book a group of distinguished humanities researchers, all working in Britain, but publishing research of international importance, reflect on the public value of their discipline, using particular research projects as case-studies. Their essays are passionate, sometimes polemical, often witty and consistently thought-provoking, covering a range of humanities disciplines from theology to architecture and from media studies to anthropology.
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First published January 1, 2011
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About the author
Jonathan Bate
118 books129 followersJonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is an English academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. A Man Booker Prize judge in 2014.
He studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He has been King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. He is married to author and biographer Paula Byrne. He has also written one novel, The Cure for Love.
He studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He has been King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. He is married to author and biographer Paula Byrne. He has also written one novel, The Cure for Love.
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January 10, 2016
About the time he was beginning his university studies in film and theatre I overhead a discussion between my son and my mother where he mounted a resoundingly pragmatic response to her ‘what’s the point of it all, how will it get you a job’ question, by noting that both his parents had humanities degrees and seemed to be doing OK. My mother was strongly attached to the Victorian notion of ‘really useful knowledge’ (not that she’d have used that term) despite (or perhaps because of) living in a household of chaps prone to exploring things for no other reason than it’d be nice to know – I recall a very brief teenage interest in early Egyptian dynasties, even though knowledge of a 5000 year old state structure was of no obvious value in a predominantly working class tourist town in coastal New Zealand; I was at the same time deeply concerned with fibre-glassing techniques so I could fix my sailing dinghy – it wasn’t all arcane. About the same time my brother had an intense interest in vaguely mystical Middle Eastern poetry: it was the 1970s, we did that kind of thing then and could get away with it because we were teenagers (I’m not sure how my father justified his eclectic tastes in reading and knowledge acquisition, picked up I always suspected from his clergyman father).
My mother’s question to my son (when I was an undergraduate similar questions was prompted by a copy of Marshall Sahlin’s Stone Age Economics ) is one all humanities scholars know well – how will your study of subject X get you a job/improve business productivity/make the world a safer place/deal with today’s pressing issue? This diverse and engaging collection of essays by leading humanities scholars sets out to answer that specific question by investigating four perspectives on the public value of scholarship. Some of the essays are built around the place of the past in what we know and how we learn, others focus on place and role of the humanities in how we live the present, still others consider the humanities in policy and the final set look at the skills of meaning making that emerge from study in the humanities. Although all are based in research, the vast majority of authors explicitly or implicitly assert the vital role of teaching in humanities’ practice.
In his opening essay Bate shapes the contributions that follow by exploring questions he casts in either a Benthamite (as in Jeremey, the philosopher) or Coleridgian (as in Samuel Taylor, the poet) tradition, which can be summarised as, for Bentham, ‘is this claim true?’, and for Coleridge ‘what does this claim mean?’ – truth and meaning, the two aspects of all scholarly work. The brief to authors was clearly to ground contributions in existing scholarly practice, so most of the essays draw on the conduct and outcomes of UK-based research projects. In some (such as, Katie Overy’s piece on research in music) this is a set of projects in one institution, in others (such as Catherine Leyshon’s about the dialogue between landscape and creative texts) these are experiences in a locality, while others (Deborah Howard’s on inter-disciplinary urban studies research in Venice) draw primarily on the author’s own work – and it is to the credit of authors who draw on their own experience that in all cases this is illustrative, not self-aggrandising.
The most instrumental cases deal with informing policy – here we have discussion of legal studies and genocide studies (although I particularly liked the way this essay extended the insights of genocide studies to issues related to responses to climate change), the History and Policy network and questions of value and worth in the creative industries. Other essays I found stimulating for my work – Mike Press’s piece on art and design considered cases such as the development of prosthetics not from an aesthetic approach but from art and design approaches as research methods in medical research: I work in a school where we have a significant group working on injury prevention and recovery, where some of these ideas might be remarkably useful.
Despite their potentially daunting content – classics, religious history, architecture, material culture, Shakespeare studies, linguistics, literature and the vital role of unpredictability in the outcomes of humanities research – these essays are, for the most part, deftly written with a light touch; it seems to me they have in mind Eric Hobsbawm’s audience, “that theoretical construct, the intelligent and educated citizen, who is not merely curious…, but wishes to understand how and why the world has come to be what it is today and whither it is going” (from the preface to The Age of Revolution). Happily, most succeed and mount a compelling justification for and defence of the humanities (although as a practitioner of humanities research I am, of course, predisposed to find them valuable, although not necessarily any defence of them compelling). What is more, the essays are short – 7-12 pages of text in each case – yet between them they add up to a vital collection. I found their base in existing and diverse practice a crucial component of their value and power.
The collection was published in 2011: if anything, since then the need for a robust defence of the humanities has become more urgent – these essays on value remain valuable, and useful.
My mother’s question to my son (when I was an undergraduate similar questions was prompted by a copy of Marshall Sahlin’s Stone Age Economics ) is one all humanities scholars know well – how will your study of subject X get you a job/improve business productivity/make the world a safer place/deal with today’s pressing issue? This diverse and engaging collection of essays by leading humanities scholars sets out to answer that specific question by investigating four perspectives on the public value of scholarship. Some of the essays are built around the place of the past in what we know and how we learn, others focus on place and role of the humanities in how we live the present, still others consider the humanities in policy and the final set look at the skills of meaning making that emerge from study in the humanities. Although all are based in research, the vast majority of authors explicitly or implicitly assert the vital role of teaching in humanities’ practice.
In his opening essay Bate shapes the contributions that follow by exploring questions he casts in either a Benthamite (as in Jeremey, the philosopher) or Coleridgian (as in Samuel Taylor, the poet) tradition, which can be summarised as, for Bentham, ‘is this claim true?’, and for Coleridge ‘what does this claim mean?’ – truth and meaning, the two aspects of all scholarly work. The brief to authors was clearly to ground contributions in existing scholarly practice, so most of the essays draw on the conduct and outcomes of UK-based research projects. In some (such as, Katie Overy’s piece on research in music) this is a set of projects in one institution, in others (such as Catherine Leyshon’s about the dialogue between landscape and creative texts) these are experiences in a locality, while others (Deborah Howard’s on inter-disciplinary urban studies research in Venice) draw primarily on the author’s own work – and it is to the credit of authors who draw on their own experience that in all cases this is illustrative, not self-aggrandising.
The most instrumental cases deal with informing policy – here we have discussion of legal studies and genocide studies (although I particularly liked the way this essay extended the insights of genocide studies to issues related to responses to climate change), the History and Policy network and questions of value and worth in the creative industries. Other essays I found stimulating for my work – Mike Press’s piece on art and design considered cases such as the development of prosthetics not from an aesthetic approach but from art and design approaches as research methods in medical research: I work in a school where we have a significant group working on injury prevention and recovery, where some of these ideas might be remarkably useful.
Despite their potentially daunting content – classics, religious history, architecture, material culture, Shakespeare studies, linguistics, literature and the vital role of unpredictability in the outcomes of humanities research – these essays are, for the most part, deftly written with a light touch; it seems to me they have in mind Eric Hobsbawm’s audience, “that theoretical construct, the intelligent and educated citizen, who is not merely curious…, but wishes to understand how and why the world has come to be what it is today and whither it is going” (from the preface to The Age of Revolution). Happily, most succeed and mount a compelling justification for and defence of the humanities (although as a practitioner of humanities research I am, of course, predisposed to find them valuable, although not necessarily any defence of them compelling). What is more, the essays are short – 7-12 pages of text in each case – yet between them they add up to a vital collection. I found their base in existing and diverse practice a crucial component of their value and power.
The collection was published in 2011: if anything, since then the need for a robust defence of the humanities has become more urgent – these essays on value remain valuable, and useful.
Displaying 1 of 1 review