Riverside—Fall 2017

Humanities expertise are understood to be beyond quantification/measurement. Nonetheless, in making a case for humanist expertise – without knowing who we are addressing–we do not want to reproduce the conversations currently happening around the transferrable skills of the PhD, with their emphasis on “collaboration,” “communication,” etc., that tend to follow a logic of equations. So, even as we accept that humanities expertise (especially the capacity for critical thinking) is essentially unquantifiable, we end up asking: What does your PhD equal? What is your PhD worth? How can you translate your degree into X? In this session, we would like to interrogate the assumptions built into the idea of humanities expertise by asking: how can equations –

Additive, like

Classroom instruction  + lesson preparation  = curriculum design

Subtractive, like

Dissertation — intellectual foci = project management.

– be disrupted?

We also wonder:

• What does your PhD disrupt?
• Does professonalization make room for disruption?
• How does a PhD inform the way we look at/accomodate to/participate in/disrupt the world?

For most of those who have devoted the better part of a decade to earning a PhD in the humanities, a doctoral degree and the experience of earning it holds a deep, inherent value. And yet, higher education struggles to articulate the nature of that value, often resorting to traditional economic notions of earnings and transferrable skills.  In this session, we will explore the concept of value as it is defined within multiple disciplines and contexts to develop a study of humanistic inquiry and career diversity. Underlying this approach is Peter Bansel’s idea of “unbecoming academic” and the attendant question of how we define the value of an academic degree as we “unbecome” academics at work in the world.