Public in Persons: Along Humanities’ Ethical Edges

Catalog description

This course will offer a challenge and a potential to Public Humanities practices and theorizing: to place the irreducibility of individual human experiences as one of its most compelling and profound principles. This consideration differs from forms of “ethics” as they shaped traditional Western philosophy, where the focus was on the ways to lead “a good life” for a very specific, and small, part of the population. But recent ethical responses globally to racisms, genocides, and dispossessions now are frequency spoken in terms of responsibility, radical difference, vulnerability, and hospitality. This course will introduce students to how such ideas might inform “ethical praxis” in Public Humanities, offering case studies and guest presentations alongside writings addressing these four areas of interaction.