Liner Note 54. The Humanities We Can Build Right Now: Introduction

Banff, Alberta back country on June 3, 2026  

This piece is my introduction to a panel at the Annual Meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes in Banff, Alberta. 

 

CHCI funds research initiatives, among other things--see their Climate Futures call and other initiatives. The theme of this year's meeting was "Building the Future We Want," which is also an implicit theme of this blog. Building that future means putting humanities research into modes of influence in the world, which involves transforming our existing knowledge system, an issue with which I'm a bit obsessed.  

 

My panel featured Dennis Hogan talking about using the AI-induced spotlighting of humanities skills to rebuild the humanities, Colleen Lye talking about the unexpectedly complex and even dialectical politics of fundraising, Asheesh Kapur Siddique on building a new public politics of humanities support, and Christopher Nealon on freeing our collective intelligence from capitalist labor strategies towards humanities knowledge.  Many thanks to them for giving such superb talks. I hope to get most of the papers up in the space in the next week or two.

 

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This session is called, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now." One of the things I’ve loved about the sessions at this conference is the combination of disciplines that everyone is working with and bringing together: literature and history, philosophy and law, legal and psychological dimensions of academic freedom, institutional and cultural analysis, writing pedagogy and energy sciences, computational and narrative work. These combinations are powerful and difficult. Knowledge is shaped by problems and problems can only be addressed finally by multiple disciplines working together: Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice, a project run by economists at my own foundation, draws on critical microfinance specialists, experts on Chinese government guidance funds, cultural theorists, and climate scientists.   The panels here at CHCI feel to me bound together as research for alternative futures that emerge from current but recessive and often suppressed features of actuality that we want present in our lives right now. The full versions of these projecgts are expensive.

 

Our panelists are going to talk about various modes of conceptual building and transformation and some of their effects. But first, I’m going to spend a few minutes to mention the issue that often haunts me as I put together panels or workshops that are about bringing humanities research to bear on problems of cultures and their worlds. This issue is that we are obliged to build our research and the material pre-conditions for that research at the same time—which is to build parts of the plane while we are flying it. We are great at naming and describing new intellectual terrains—energy humanities, abolition university studies, the mining humanities I learned last night exists at the University of Wyoming, etc. We are great at describing our processes.  Going from processes to outcomes or from methods to findings--that is harder. It’s institutional. It costs real money. And yet getting humanities practices to the stage of research results, in my experience in working with scientists and engineers, is a precondition of full collaboration with them.

 

I’m convinced that the humanities need to have more real-world influence over the issues we’ve talked about at this conference, which would allow us to increase our direct benefit to communities outside the academy.  I’m also convinced that we are held back not by our methods or our data but by our funding, or lack thereof, which has produced an underdeveloped infrastructure and a certain longterm epistemic inferiority to other fields—in the eyes of those fields, of administrators, of policymakers, and perhaps also in our own eyes. Our fiscal positioning shapes our ambitions, particularly for circulating scholarly results that would materially change public discourse. 

 

The humanities have been changing the culture for decades, on topics involving race and sexuality—gay marriage came in no small part from 40 years of humanities theory and philosophy. Here we have heard scholars discussing their work on topics from energy and climate to the digital systems that are historically owned by the STEM fields plus economics.  We have real conceptual influence there too, but to help reverse the climate emergency or to block AI-induced cognitive offloading, we will need to do more building—and do this building under adverse fiscal conditions that we engage in an expectation of transformation.

 

In December 2022, the Modern Language Association issued a Statement on Research Funding in the Humanities through its Executive Council, in whose drafting I was directly involved. It reads in part as follows:

Were federal agencies to spend one percent of their [FY 2019] $46.1 billion R&D budget … on all humanities disciplines, these disciplines would receive $461 million per year. The NEH, however, spent approximately $32.6 million on research across all disciplines in [that year]. This comes to well under one-tenth of one percent of federal R&D funding. It appears to us [on the MLA EC] that US humanities scholars operate under funding constraints that unduly impair their scholarly output and limit the humanities’ public benefits.

 

… For the sake of comparability, we can combine the total agency budgets of both the NEH and the National Endowment for the Arts: this brings the total federal budget for all programming for US arts and humanities—not just research—to approximately $400 million, or just short of 0.9 percent of the federal R&D total. In 2019–20, the United Kingdom allocated 3.4 percent of UK Research and Innovation funding to its Arts and Humanities Research Council. In that same year, Canada allocated 13.1 percent of national research funding to the arts, humanities, and social sciences in its Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council; the US equivalent, adding in federal funding for the social sciences, is 1.7 percent. Mexico allocated 15 percent of federal research funding to humanities and related researchers [though from a much lower base].

 

This was the baseline before Covid-19 and before Trump 2--low levels of formal extramural funding for the socio-cultural dimensions of world problems.

 

A further wrinkle: universities in the systems I know well do not cut against low extramural funding for their humanities scholars on campus by spending higher shares of their research funds on the humanities, but repeat the external pattern: internal funds for humanities research generally stay in that 1-2% range of campus funds dedicated to research, and at some major universities, this figure is less.  

 

Today, even those internal funds are being withdrawn at many major universities. Collaborative humanities research –required in my view for alliances with climate science groups for example—is particularly endangered. When I received an NEH Collaborative Research award in 2017, it was one of 9 in the United States—on a base of 80,000 college and university instructors just in literature and languages. I say this not to praise my application but to lament their scarcity.

 

I linked this grant to another grant from UC’s Humanities Research Institute in Irvine to form a residential research group, in which economists, geographers, and cultural scholars meet for 11 weeks to hash out our many differences: this put us in the position of being able to co-author a book together.  UCHRI still exists, but its residential group infrastructure has been stripped out, with no consultation with the UC humanities professoriat. 

 

This panel is about building, not about watching as our key stuff gets dismantled before our eyes—or behind our backs.  Building includes building funding and related resources and systems. You are builders.  What you do academically with what you have built makes you rather heroic in my eyes. I would like all this to be easier (and bigger) for you.  I would like our building to include the resources that will make the academic research of those who follow us—starting with today’s early-career scholars—easier (and bigger)-- to make it easier for all of us to be more influential in the world.

 

It's in this spirit of struggle and expansion that we'll get this panel going [with some papers to follow in this space].