Hacking the humanities: Twenty-first-century literacies and the ‘becoming-other’ of the humanities

Abstract

After a recent discussion with colleagues about the role of ‘practice’ in proposed revisions to our graduate curriculum, I sat down and listed all of the different practices that had consumed my time over the previous few days, focusing on those that I would consider particular to my work as a humanities scholar. Most of them likely would be legible to the public as the kinds of work ‘humanities people’ do: starting to read Becoming Undone, the latest book by Elizabeth Grosz (2011) on Charles Darwin, and then rereading parts of Marx’s Grundrisse in preparation for an upcoming conference presentation on Marxism and New Media; revising (again) the third chapter for my book manuscript, and sketching out an outline for this essay; preparing a lecture on social memory and archives for an upcoming class; and trudging through the IRB (institutional review board) paperwork for a new ethnographic project involving medicine, gender, and visual culture.