A letter from Jena Turner, OHC Associate Director
As I reflect back on this past year at the Oregon Humanities Center (OHC) I continue to be struck by how essential the humanities are: they help us uncover, understand and address the difficult and painful issues that we face today. The humanities have always mattered. Yet it is clear that we need the humanities now more than ever. By employing our humanities tool kit—inquiry, knowledge building, critical thinking, discourse and interpretation—we can better find meaning in the world around us. Finding meaning can inspire us to take action to improve upon our shared human experience.
In this spirit, the Oregon Humanities Center (OHC) strives to support and amplify humanities-related research, scholarship, teaching, expression, and public engagement that fosters a more robust understanding of our human interconnectedness. Some of the ways we do this are by supporting faculty and graduate students to conduct rigorous research and publish scholarly works, by hosting and sponsoring free public talks, and by giving faculty an opportunity to design new courses for undergraduate and graduate students.
This past spring presented all of us with new challenges—literally on a global scale. Locally, at the OHC, we chose to accept those challenges and found new ways to connect with more people than we ever thought possible. Starting in April, we pivoted from hosting our scholarly and public humanities talks from in-person to fully online. We reached people far beyond our community, demonstrating the public’s deep desire to engage directly with the humanities. You can find the rich archive of OHC talks, lectures, and interviews on our YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6I8g7Pw9s8sentSiGlU0iQ.
This coming year we will continue to build upon the OHC’s expansive online offerings. Audiences will hear from UO faculty and graduate fellows from a wide range of humanities-related fields including: Anthropology, Cinema Studies, East Asian Languages and Literatures, English, History, History of Art and Architecture, Musicology, and Romance Languages. Behind the scenes, the OHC will be supporting our teaching fellows as they design and deliver new courses, graduate students who will be conducting research to support their dissertations, and faculty who will be conducting innovative research, leading research interest groups or delivering webinars and online lectures that are in addition to the OHC’s main offerings.
Along with our UO scholars’ work the OHC will be presenting the 2020-21 endowed lectureship series focused on the theme of Climate Justice. Advocates for climate justice believe that climate change is a human rights issue and that current social and political structures and environmental policies inequitably affect human opportunities and lived experiences amidst a changing climate.
We hope that the five-part Climate Justice lecture series will spark dialogue about how our society’s historical and current scaffolding perpetuates injustice, and what might be done to tackle these important issues. The speakers will apply their diverse expertise on topics of climate and racial justice, reparation ecology, building an equitable green economy, the interdependence between the humanities and sciences, and climate change communication across differing ideologies.
Finally, the OHC is excited to announce a 2020 matching gift opportunity thanks to the generosity of Amanda and Alex Haugland who will match up to $20,000 in gifts raised between now and December 31, 2020. When you give to the OHC you are directly supporting the discovery and innovation of cutting-edge humanities research and its dissemination. To support this work and do twice the good with one donation, please visit: https://ohc.uoregon.edu/give/.