Marco te Brömmelstroet holds the chair of Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam. In his teaching he focuses on the reciprocal relations between urban form and individual mobility behavior. In his research he is interested in the role of cycling in individual lives, the city and society. As founding academic director of the Lab of Thought he aims to accelerate mobility transitions through unsolicited provocations and training cognitive leniency.
Why was John Lennon in bed with a bicycle?
The language we speak is not a mirror of reality, but profoundly shape the problems we see and the solutions we propose. In order to accelerate truly transformative change in the mobility field, we need to acknowledge and challenge the underlying language that shaped our thinking, our asphalt and concrete, and our mobility behaviour. This is partly a process of finding new narratives and partly of experimenting with the city to collectively learn about our urban mobility futures.
Zoe Hope Bulaitis is editor-in-chief of Public Humanities and author of the open-access monograph, Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance (2020), which explores strategies for value articulation in the humanities in public life. Based at the University of Birmingham, UK, Zoe is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator working across liberal arts, creative and cultural studies, and humanities policymaking.
What is public humanities?
Public humanities happens whenever humanities scholarship interacts with public life. Providing a 10-point typology of public humanities, my talk will explain why we need the humanities—as individuals, and as societies—and narrate moments when the humanities have changed the world. I will discuss the rise of “public humanities,” offer some short critiques of the field, and set out a vision for its future. This lecture is prompted by my ongoing collaborative work setting up a new journal for the Public Humanities with Cambridge University Press.
Stefan Collini is Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of, among other books, Public Moralists (1991), Matthew Arnold: a Critical Portrait (1994), English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (1999), Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006), Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (2008), Common Writing: Literary Culture and Public Debate (2016), and The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism (2019). His edition (with Helen Thaventhiran) of William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words appeared in 2020, and his edition of George Orwell, Selected Essays in 2021. He is also a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, and other publications. In addition, he has contributed to international debates about higher education, principally through his 2012 book What Are Universities For? and its sequel Speaking of Universities (2017).
Scholarship as a vocation, even now
The term ‘public humanities’ may seem to bring together two indisputably good things: serious scholarly work and an address to wide, non-specialist audiences. But in practice those two activities have imperatives of their own which may not be so easily compatible. Starting from Max Weber’s classic discussion of ‘Scholarship [Wissenschaft] as a vocation’, this lecture will raise some questions about the enterprise of ‘public humanities’ as it is currently practised. Should scholarly work in the humanities be focussed on addressing ‘pressing global problems’? Is a ‘wide readership’ always better, or more appropriate, than a narrower one? Why are universities so desperate for this form of external legitimation? What role should funding play in determining one’s choice of subject-matter? What should be the primary aim of a young scholar at the start of an academic career?
Poul Holm is Professor of Environmental History at Trinity College Dublin, as well as Vice President of the Academia Europaea (Chair of the Humanities Class, 2018–2025) and former President of the European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities (2015–2018). His research focuses on human exploitation of the sea. Over the past twenty-five years, he has led major research projects that have established marine environmental history as a new and productive field of collaboration between the humanities and the natural sciences. From 2021 to 2027, funded by the European Research Council, he is leading a team to build a World Atlas of Human Marine Exploitation over the last two millennia. His most recent main publications (all open access) include: P. Holm, P. W. Hayes, and J. Nicholls. Historical Marine Footprint for Atlantic Europe, 1500-2019. Ambio 53 (2024): 624–36; P. Holm, SDG14. Exploiting and managing the alien and unseen world below water. In: Martin Gutman and Daniel Gorman (eds.), Before the SDGs: A Historical Companion to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Oxford University Press, 2022); P. Holm, J. Barrett, C. Brito & F. Ludlow, New challenges for the Human Oceans Past agenda. Open Research Europe 2:114 (2022), 1–24.; P. Holm, J. Nicholls, P. W. Hayes, J. Ivinson, B. Allaire, Accelerated Extractions of North Atlantic Cod and Herring, 1520-1790. Fish and Fisheries (2022).
Shifting baselines: Making history matter for ocean management
Marine environmental historians examine how humans have relied on and influenced ocean ecosystems for thousands of years. The research reveals that significant human impacts on marine environments occurred long before modern scientific observations began, challenging the idea of “conservation baselines.” This shift in understanding emphasizes that what we consider “normal” or pristine oceanic conditions today may actually reflect a degraded state when compared to earlier periods. The talk will focus on how public humanities and historical insights may inform coastal communities and be brought to bear on marine management. Obstacles include translating historical data into actionable strategies and convincing stakeholders to consider long-term historical changes when making decisions about marine resource management.
Helen Small is Merton Professor of English at the University of Oxford. Her books include The Value of the Humanities (2013), which identifies and tests the arguments most often relied upon by advocates for the Humanities. Recent work includes The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time (2022); and an Afterword to George Levine, ed., The Question of the Aesthetic (2022). She is in the early stages of a book entitled Changing Humanities.
Changing humanities
This lecture will reflect on recent changes in the global cultural and political environment for Humanities education and research as they are bearing in on contemporary university practices. Looking across to the Social Sciences for a comparative sense of how the questions and conditions of contemporary cultural inquiry are shifting, the lecture will attempt to give better definition to some specific disruptions to continuity within Humanities disciplines, including those arising from AI, shifting modes of affiliation to local v. digital cultures, intensifying patterns of social inequality, and the rapid amplification of war. Among the available historic models we might look to, as articulating somewhat-comparable earlier pressure points on cultural understanding, the lecture will pay particular attention to Lionel Trilling’s The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (collected essays, posthumously published 2000). The evident datedness of that volume provides a starting point for reframing what humanistic intelligence might need to stretch to now.
Joanna Sofaer is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton, Co-Director of the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities (SIAH) and was Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fellow (2017-2023). Her current research focuses on the role of cultural assets in supporting health and wellbeing, working in partnership with communities, health professionals, the third sector, public and private organisations. Projects include Pathways to Health Through Cultures of Neighbourhoods (UKRI), Heritage and Wellbeing for NHS Staff (Historic England in collaboration with Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust) and Heritage Perception and Wellbeing (National Trust). She leads the Pathways Consortium composed of 30+ organisations in Southampton committed to youth voice and reducing health inequalities for young people across the city, and co-leads Community Researcher and Young Researcher Training Programmes at University of Southampton. Joanna is also interested in the past as inspiration for contemporary creative practice, and creativity in material culture. She has led and partnered on several transnational European projects including the HERA-funded project Creativity and Craft Production in Middle and Late Bronze Age Europe.
What is applied humanities research and where should we go with it?
The Humanities are often understood as having intrinsic value. However, the drive to address global challenges and to generate ‘impact’ tends to push Humanities towards an increasingly applied focus. This can create tension between a view of the humanities in which it is valued for its own sake and one where it is instrumentalised. This lecture explores the challenges presented by this tension. It suggests charting a course for ethical and community engaged humanities research as a fruitful way forward.