In AY 2024–25 our community will be considering how method, foundational to all of our work in some form, animates our projects. We are excited to dwell in the questions that emerge from that consideration, and to envisage how an interdisciplinary humanities environment might offer ways to reconsider our work by bringing it into conversation with those also re-imagining their methodological foundations.
In the humanities, method often takes the form of close reading and deep listening, distant reading and visualization, reparative reading, surface reading, immanent critique, and archiving, as well as performance, composing, painting, dancing. But what other other forms of inquiry are particular to or possible in humanistic methods? In 2024–25 we want to consider the role of method in interdisciplinary spaces. We ask, how do issues of method make it easier or harder to collaborate with other researchers/creators in the humanities? Or even beyond? While method boasts a distinct valence in the sciences—though we might think critically about the singular notion of “the scientific method”—and while we’re also conscious that humanities scholars are sometimes less ready with explanations of method in grant and fellowship applications, we wonder also about points of contact and overlap among all disciplines.
For example, do methodological practices in the digital humanities have implications for research practices in the humanities more generally? Or, for example, if ethnography is no longer the purview of anthropology alone, is it practiced differently in other disciplines? What about autoethnography, or place-based and/or ecological studies more broadly? What role does and can activism play in humanistic inquiry? What about counterfactuality, thought experiment, fictioning, or unnamed methods? Are there reasons to be against method altogether, and what does that look like?
Such questions lead us to reflect on the ways in which method both aligns and misaligns with our disciplines, and whether method is transposable between disciplines. These questions illuminate the desire for forms that 1) bridge humanities and non-humanities audiences, and not just through theory but through community practice, outreach, and service learning, and 2) articulate our research to, but also in collaboration with, general publics.
Pitt's Humanities Center is a place for people to collaborate humanistically across disciplinary boundaries and programs: indeed, our community is comprised of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members, all of whom are in dialog and learning from one another, which is its own method worth considering. The theme of “Method?” aims to bring people together around a series of related processes and to spark new possibilities for research, experimentation, and creative practice.