This piece, on UVA researchers, has me thinking.  I know a number of these people.  They're great people.  I think in their fields, they are indeed excellent researchers.  Every one of them deserves this reward.  Congrats to all of them!

I'm a bit surprised, though, that the humanities as a base of research seems to have been occluded by these selection procedures for these awards.  Rita Dove, Kevin Everson, and Alan Taylor get honorable mentions, of a sort, in this list, along with a few dozen others.  But when you compare that to the dozen-plus mentioned in the Education school, and more in the Engineering school, and the med center, and the sciences...well, apparently what the humanities do isn't really research.

Certainly technology is a powerful example of research.  I wouldn't disagree with that.  I have benefited from technology as much as anyone!  I love technology!  (You're reading my blog!  On a computer!)  And I am grateful, grateful, for much of its blessings.  This is not a screed about technology.  Nor is it a whining complaint about my university's conception of research.  We do great in the humanities at UVA--and we are very much appreciated by the university as a whole.  

No, there's a deeper and more interesting problem.  The difficulty here seems to be in classifying what people in the humanities do as "research."  It may seem weird to think of what we do as "research," where we go out--say, into a "field"--and bring back samples; or do experiments; or reveal that our understandings of processes were misconceived, and providing people with a better account of the processes, in order more properly to intervene in them.

But I think it's pretty clear, when you get a proper understanding of the humanities, that in fact our work does all of these things.

Here are a few examples of very, very large research outputs--I don't know what you'd call them, discoveries? innovations?--that people in the humanities have developed in the past few decades.  I'll mention something telegraphic about them.  I'd say they've had a kind of large impact over the past few decades.

(1) Cultures are not fixed and distinct from one another; they are plural, conflictual, and always evolving.  I mean, this "discovery" goes back quite a ways.  You could locate it in Romanticism.  You could locate it in anthropology, especially ethnography of the past half-century or so.  But as a world, we are still collectively trying to work out what this means.  When we talk about "globalization," we are talking about the ways in which cultures can move around and be "at home" far from where they began, and how pieces of cultural practice can do that as well.  Conversely, when we talk about "cultural appropriation," as people do today, we run right into complexities of authenticity and ownership.  What is an appropriate "development" of a culture, and what is not?  All these questions, and many more, are illuminated by a deeper--even a better!!--understanding of the category of "culture," and what it enables us to see, and what it makes harder for us to see.

(2) "Whiteness" as a racial category is not a natural category that obviously attaches to some people, it is a matter of in-group and out-group lines, which are always being renegotiated; therefore, whiteness has a history, and is not an attribution innocent of political and cultural implications.  A lot to say here, but effectively the debates roiling American politics today are, in no small part, about the degree to which America is essentially white, with other groups edged in along the margins. And these debates are actually quite global, in fact.  There's a whole field of studies not just of race, but also of whiteness, with figures like David Roediger and Nell Irvin Painter, among many many others, involved here.  They're telling us something about how our world works, too.

(3) Gender is crucially a matter of performance.  Seriously, the emergence into widespread public recognition over the past decade of complications about gender identity--complications that have been roiling high schools and the parents of high schoolers--can be traced back, it seems to me, to a number of scholars of gender and sexuality over the past generation or so.  Preeminent among such scholars, in my very limited knowledge, would be Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble, published in 1990, was a watershed for such research--though there were very important predecessors, such as de Beauvoir and Irigaray.  You don't think this work has had an impact in the world? 

(4) The idea of "the secular" has a history and is not a simple absence of something straightforwardly designated as "religion".

This is in my field, so it may loom larger to me than it does to others.  But it shouldn't, as again, these debates are massively important for understanding our world.  The basic story here is simple: we used to think of secularism as a "subtraction story," in the words of the philosopher Charles Taylor: that is, society had something attached to it, called "religion," and religion could be detached, and the rest of the social order would continue on as before.  Want to secure "freedom from religion"?  Fine!  No problem!  Religion is an easily recognizable and well-bounded thing, and as long as those things were not done, or not done in public, secularism is fine.  Today, scholars have shown us that this,  in fact, is not a good picture of secularism, and the idea of "religion" it assumes only applies to some things we want to call "religion"--roughly, the closer it is to Presbyterianism, the more easily it fits under the category of "religion".  Along with Taylor, theorists of society and scholars of religion have uncovered the ways that the categories we use to see the world--categories like "religion" and "society," are not simply, as it were, "natural kinds," like silver or water or birch trees; they are instead human categories, designed for particular use, in particular cultures, with particular configurations of the social order, and particular patterns of behavior which seem particularly suited to being called "religious".  And then we go and apply these categories, as we are wont to do, willy-nilly across the face of the earth.  And that's connected to who has the power to make their categorization of the world stick, as it were.

    Why does this matter?  Think about the conflicts roiling many parts of the world about religious symbolism.  Can Muslims wear headscarves in public?  If not, why not?  Those people over there are wearing crosses, or yarmulkas.  What kinds of accommodations should we provide for people's religious beliefs?  

These are just four big ones, which kind of popped into my mind.  I'm sure I'm distorting what you would say about each of them.  I'm also sure I'm missing some other massive ones.  I mean, I can think of more right away.  (Debates about freedom and the history of that concept, in philosophy and political theory and history--its relationship to "republicanism" and slavery, for instance.)

These are outcome-obvious forms of research.  But of course a lot of what the humanities do is very much inward-looking: re-narrating the history of thought, perhaps, or suggesting rival hermeneutical approaches may be more fractious, or more harmonizable, than we thought.  There's a lot of meta in the humanities.  But there's a lot of "outputs," too.  Maybe we need to do better to make them visible.

One last thing.  In a way, each of these "discoveries," if that's what we want to call them, and I do want to call them that, are about the complicated interface between recognizable human agency and the deep background of human behavior that we call "natural" or maybe even "second nature."  And each of them needs to engage in work of hard interpretation, before metrics and structures of quantifiable data can emerge.  So the humanities do a kind of "research" which is about the world, but not a kind of research which is scientific or even social-scientific.  (This is sometimes visible in critiques of social science; just this morning I was listening to Jill Lepore tear a big hole in Ezra Klein's new book Why we're Polarized, on Klein's own podcast.  (Don't worry the book is still very much worth reading.)  To hear what I mean, start listening, at around 14 minutes in, to this podcast.)  

Here I wish more people would just go read Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method.  If you're a humanist, and you've never read it, it's worth your while.

Anyway, as ever, this is just a remark about how to make what humanists do visible.  Can we do it?  If we get people to see what we're saying as about realities in the world, yes we can.  And we do speak about the world, oh yes we do.  Maybe we simply have to call more attention to it.