Realizing capacities with/through universities (roundtable)
Joni Adamson, Arizona State University
Ainehi Edoro, University of Wisconsin–Madison
David Theo Goldberg, UC Irvine
Sha Xin Wei, Arizona State University

Prompted to bring up one thing from the previous conversation, Joni Adamson, ASU, referenced Erica Robles-Anderson’s comment about relation preceding meaning (a meaningful observation in relation to her own capacity building career) as well as Alison Gerber’s work on how disciplines emerge and the following discussion of what interdisciplinary is, e.g. a tool or a destination. Sha Xin Wei, ASU, brought up a question Craig Calhoun had raised about how to mediate large-scale forms of collectivity, accounting for relationality and different registers of value, which also connects to Matt Ratto’s (and other participants’) discussion of modalities in which one can create different kinds of artefacts that allow people to experimentally think about those questions. Ainehi Edoro, University of Wisconsin-Madison, related to Patrik Svensson’s comments about capacity building and infrastructure. Working in the academic and cultural space has made her understand the importance of investing in infrastructure in a way that will pay off in the distant future. In a cultural space, like African literature/book publishing, what does it mean to build infrastructure that allows archiving to happen, allows a connection to the markets, allows certain kinds knowledge work to happen in such a space, but in a kind of foresight mentality: how will this thing make a space that will benefit communities 30-50 years to come, allowing cultures to be situated, to move and to thrive. David Theo Goldberg, UCI, stepped back historically to offer what he called “a bit of provocation” that drew on and cut across what many people had been discussing. He argued that the era of institutions such as healthcare, education, social security etc. - coming out of the 18th and manifesting themselves in the 19th centuries (e.g. universities), have been unraveling over the past 40+ (almost 50) years as a result of factors such as demographic shifts, transformations of political economy, technological development etc. This means that the unraveling of institutions we now can follow in real time has a longer history. Goldberg also added to a comment by Craig Calhoun that disciplines are about vocabularies and bibliographies that they are also about the questions being asked and the methodologies being advanced to address those questions. They become self-protective, self-protecting and self-advancing at the cost of addressing larger sorts of societal challenges - all of which are multi-dimensional and require both multi-specialist and generalized knowledge. At the end of the era of institutions, we need to think about what it means to mobilize institutions, institutions as mobilizing networks.

Sha Xin Wei made some comments about technicity, a new humanism incorporating a more sophisticated approach to machines and technology. There are two different ways – a downstream way (where technology is more or less given to us and we can offer critique, historicize etc.) and there is another way where you are there at the birth, at the moment when people are imagining what could be a technology and then to participate in that conversation. Both are viable. The humanities/arts are at the tail end of the pipeline (or think that they should be). He also brought up organizations like a lab or a studio, can be compared to an older model, the atelier, which is based on craft, making something durable to society, whether a cathedral, painting or a chair. In an atalier, what are the objects that people are making or what services are being offered (a clinic, repairing a chair)? If this is equivalent to the present condition – then we can think about what kinds of propositions that can be entertained in such an entity (proposition not to “solve” but to problematize and as a lure for feeling, further thought etc.). So in his teaching, he suggests thinking about a proposition first and then the techniques, tactics and technologies that one would have to invent to adequately pursue these propositions or inquires – such work will need a high level of technicity since it cannot be done with ready-made techniques and technology. It is through this spirit of making - experimental, speculative making - he is coming to the conversation.

Joni Adamson’s own work is in indigenous studies, multispecies relationships, the rights of nature movement as well as the environmental justice movement. She has also invested 25 years in on-the-ground capacity and infrastructure building which has culminated in the first humanities-led sustainable initiative within the UN and UNESCO. And all of this has grown out of on-the-ground work with professional organizations and mentoring lots and lots of graduate students. The first organization was the establishment of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment where Adamson as an English professor and literary scholar contributed to what became the largest environmental humanities organization. Initially it was just hard work. There were not any environmental humanities programs and they mentored graduate students that did not have it in their departments. They also co-founded a diversity caucus to make sure the organization would like in the future what it wanted to look like now, again through mentoring graduate students, helping them put together programs, making sure the organizations itself was representing diversity on the annual programs each year. She also worked in the American Studies Association for many years to even get environmental and environmental justice subjects on the program. She founded the Environmental Diversity Caucus there, an organization that worked for 10 years to get panels and grad students mentored in this domain. Adamsson pointed out how all this is on-the-ground work you have to do to build capacity and support emerging fields.

All this led in the 2000s to a sense that the humanities across all the disciplines needed to converge into the environmental humanities, a movement that started in Austalia and spread to the world. In 2013 global networks were forming. Humanities for the Environment was founded in 2013 and brought together 39 leading environmental humanities programs on five continents organized thorugh 8 observatories. It was through this structure, Humanities for the Environment, that BRIDGES (“UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES is a humanities-driven transdisciplinary sustainability science coalition focused on solving the social problems highlighted by the UN Sustainable Development Goals“) was co-founded with UNESCO-MOST (The Management of Social Transformations Programme). Today with BRIDGES they are again trying to build capacities, for example realted to what Sofia Lundmark brought up about the need to have youth voices foregrounded. At the recent UN Summit of the Future, BRIDGES convened a session that brought together organizations like Reimagine South Africa, the Club of Rome and the Learning Planet Institute in Paris to foreground youth voices and humanities approaches to sustainability science challenges.

Ainehi Edoro described Brittle Paper (“Explore African Literature”) as a literary platform focusing on African literature, African book culture and literary culture in general. Something like a New York Book Review page but more capacious than that, with a broader cultural curation. It is considered one of the major of places to go to for these topics. The audience is mainstream, non-academic, which was a decision made very early in the project. Visibility (language in early 2010s, culture had to be represented) was an important driving force. There was a lot of “cool stuff” that was happening in the African literary space and Edoro felt that it had to be captured. Over time, Brittle Paper became a one-stop shop for anyone interested in this space. Eventually visibility morphed into a more archival project, or rather they layered on archival capacity. They also started to monitor publications and provide a list. Edoro said she realized that the best catalogues are not always the perfect ones but the ones you can actually use to create things that are culturally meaningful. From this database they built a 100 Notable African Books of the year-list, which has become a mainstay of the culture (publishers, authors, Goodreads etc.). As time has gone on, another layer has been added, a space where people in the market, in the industry side can see what African literature is capable of. For example, if you want to give an author a book deal, you have to be sure that there is a place where the author can get visibility for their work and themselves. The Brittle Paper platform can help an author to get in front of readers, which increases the likelihood for a publisher to sign an African author. Edoro said that Brittle Paper 1) creates visibility for African literary culture, 2) is a place where book readers, scholars etc. come together to enjoy and express their joy for African reading, and 3) a massive archive (by now some 7000 articles).

David Theo Goldberg added a comment about how the way in which any social challenge to be addressed, worth addressing, requires bringing together different kinds of capacities, including conceptual capacity, identifying capacities and resources available at hand and how to draw on them, financial resources, technological resources and people that can promote those capacities. Capacity building is multi-dimensional in its particularities and worked out in conversation with others, drawing others into a conversation inside and outside institutions. So in thinking about making capacities, we need to consider its constitutive conditions. Sha Xin Wei added to this, drawing on the earlier discussion of conviviality, a question: How could we in various groupings - also reaching out to others - set up the constitute conditions for this kind of conviviality. And what would be the modalities in which we can undertake these different experimental practices. We do not have to accept the modalities given to us, for example the standard model of the laboratory. This is very precious, a sense of openness. One word of caution is that we - who have the articulateness, disciplinary knowledge and institutional power - it is not for us to speak more or on behalf of those we are excluding. By including we are also excluding. Relating back to the earlier conversation about youth involvement in planning processes (Sofia Lundmark, Joni Adamson and others), Sha Xin Wei said that this principle can be generalized to any participatory design process.

PICKED UP FROM THE CHAT:

Erica Robles Anderson 17:42
Thinking with Ainehi’s remarks, I am very interested in this as well and have been trying to think about what my brain wants to call “creative provisioning” to gesture at these investments and relations that provision ongoing future practice and possibility.

AINEHI EJIEME EDORO 18:08
Thanks everyone. This is invigorating.

Joni Adamson 18:08
Thank you so much Patrik and everyone.  Very provocative.

NOOPUR 18:09
Same to you! Take care