Extending Care: Integrity, Ethics, and Social Justice in the Humanities

Naeem Nedaee

Department of English and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, University of British Columbia

I write out of an obsession with thinking and imagining future worlds, bending ideas, and testing their creative limits. My passion for philosophy and literature has partly been influenced by the social and familial values with which I grew up. Throughout my young years, I was read children’s stories by my two sisters, and I soon learned to read on my own. The first book that I read independently was an illustrated Persian edition of “Aesop’s Fables” adapted by Leo Tolstoy, a gift from my parents to celebrate my first year at school. That entire summer, I read the collection over and over, entranced by speaking animal characters facing moral predicaments. From then on, I would read anything that I could lay my hands on – even a pocketbook on pregnancy from my aunt’s bookshelf. Attending high school, however, I found access to a library stacked with books of fiction. I could not imagine anything more thrilling than reading a different book every few days. I would read novels entirely beyond my grasp – such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude – and those that tugged at my imagination profoundly – Franz Kafka’s The Castle, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. These were my entry points to thinking about the complexities of social life and the darker recesses of the human mind. Although I went on to study electronics in college, perhaps under the social pressure to follow a career path that promised financial stability, or because of the passion for scientific innovation that Jules Verne’s fiction had instilled in me, I decided, in moving forward, to shift to English literature to cultivate my interest in the intricacies of existence and experience.

The English programs that I completed were designed with the implicit assumption that humanities education should prioritize the analysis and interpretation of texts over actively engaging with society and politics. While this approach was primarily influenced by local ideological barriers that assigned the humanities to the relatively ‘safe’ confines of the text, it also had its roots in a long-standing tradition of aestheticism dating to the literary and philosophical movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – high modernism, for instance, emphasized individualism and the subjective experience. In the aesthetic tradition, the text was viewed as a work of art to be appreciated for its own sake, detached from real-life ethical or political implications. Failed revolutionary movements in mid-twentieth century Europe also contributed to a skeptical view of the political efficacy of arts and literature. Although a depoliticized, socially disengaged education did not prevent me from contemplating life and being, I was not particularly equipped with the conceptual tools that I needed to make an impact in the world. I became keenly aware of this shortcoming upon reading the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who viewed texts as “assemblages” or “multiplicities” – dynamic, creative, and transformative acts and expressions of worldmaking – rather than dreams to be interpreted or decoded for their hidden meanings (1987, p. 4).

The sociopolitical role of the humanities is still sometimes overlooked or dismissed, with a narrowly utilitarian focus on praxis leading some to view the humanities as superfluous. However, theory and praxis should not be viewed as binary opposites but rather, are mutually reinforcing. Even in ancient Greece, the study of literature, history, and the visual arts was seen as a means of developing critical thinking skills and moral values that enabled individuals to contribute to society. Building on the Greek cultural heritage, the Romans designed disciplines such as rhetoric, law, and moral philosophy to prepare young upper-class men for positions of power and influence in the Roman state. When the modern university emerged in late eleventh-century Italy with the University of Bologna, education was aimed at preparing the clergy and ruling elite as future leaders. Over time, other universities were established in Europe, and the concept of a university spread to other parts of the world. With the rise of the middle class and the emergence of the humanities in the fourteenth century, the university became more inclusive and open to a wider audience. While at the time limited to the study of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, and history, the humanities have since diversified into new, more specialized fields of study. The humanities today include – besides the core disciplines of literature, philosophy, history, and religion – distinct yet often overlapping fields, such as cultural studies, gender and feminism, film studies, (new) media studies, digital humanities, visual culture studies, communication, and inter/transdisciplinary studies.

Despite their expansion in scope, the humanities have frequently been questioned for their utility in recent times (see Cohen, 2009). In a predominantly STEM world going through global economic crises and dwindling government budgets, the perceived lack of tangible outcomes of humanities research and education has been one of the major reasons behind funding cuts, especially in North America. In Canada, the federal government slightly decreased the funding for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the 2012-13 period (Seidman, 2014). Funding decreases affected areas such as faculty hiring, student enrollment, course offerings, and research opportunities in arts and/or humanities programs at University of Alberta (Bradshaw, 2013), Mount Royal University (Gerson, 2013), McMaster University, University of Ottawa, University of Toronto, and Western University for the period between 2010 and 2016 (Tariq & Reid, 2017). In the US, the Trump administration called for significantly reducing the funding to begin closing the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in its 2018, 2019, and 2020 budget proposals (Kinsella, 2020). Congress ultimately restored funding to these agencies, but the proposal sparked a national conversation about the value of humanities research and education.

While humanities programs have been targeted for their perceived superfluousness in times of financial uncertainty, they play a pivotal role in fostering cultural and intellectual development, as well as promoting critical thinking, empathy, and ethical reasoning. My intention here is not to argue for the financial profitability and investability of humanities programs – although they do produce profit, for instance, by inspiring innovation in technology and entertainment industries. However, humanities research and education should not be evaluated solely based on their financial potential. The fundamental necessity of the humanities derives, instead, from their role in creating and maintaining a just, equitable, fair, and inclusive society. Following in the footsteps of new-materialist philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti, I stress the need for a new framework for research and education that promotes knowledge as geared toward accountability, sustainability, and social justice (2013, pp. 1–12). In the next section, I will explore the ways in which a socially committed and pragmatically oriented worldview can shape our understanding of academic integrity as a foundational ethical premise in humanities education and research. In other words, I view academic integrity not as the bare technical task of incorporating other texts into one’s own, but rather, as an ethical principle that guides knowledge production and civic engagement toward the attainment of social justice.